Chapter 27
Scrying
They don’t drive far before Erin is turning off the surface streets and into a narrow alley that runs behind a large residential apartment building, heading for a wider alley tucked away out of sight, fenced in by brick on all sides.
Once there, she wedges the van into an open spot half-concealed by a dumpster and kills the engine.
Even with the dumpster in the way, it’s obvious that the van is the newest vehicle in this space by more than a decade, and it’s also the only one with no visible dents or dings. Erin shoves the keys into her pocket and climbs out of the van, not looking back.
“Erin always finds parking,” says Smita, apparently taking Lilianne’s silence for confusion.
“It’s something about the way the streets order themselves.
Honestly, it feels like a stretch to me, but nobody asked me whether I thought magic parking should come with being the incarnation of passive-aggressively rearranging the fridge magnets. ”
Artemis snorts, clearly more amused than the statement deserves, and everyone else starts getting out of the van.
Judy pokes Lilianne in the shoulder. “Hey,” she says. “Get out. You’re sort of trapping us in here.”
Lilianne doesn’t move.
Judy pokes her again, this time saying something irritated in Cantonese.
Roger snorts and responds in kind before leaning around his girlfriend and saying, “We really do need you to move, please. We can’t go down to the lab until we all get out of the van. Getting out of the van is a pretty key first step.”
“What if I don’t get out of the van?”
“Well, eventually Erin will notice you’re still in the van, and she’ll come back to remove you.” Roger says it like it’s completely reasonable, and not the most terrifying thing he could possibly have said.
Lilianne gets out of the van.
“Great, thanks,” says Judy, climbing out and moving away, Roger close on her heels.
He pauses to give Lilianne a sympathetic look, then keeps moving, following Judy to the others, who have clumped up in the center of the alley.
With a heavy sigh, Lilianne goes after them, catching up to the group just as Erin pushes the button on her keys to close the van door.
“All right,” she says. “We know where the entrance is in this apartment complex, so we’re going in through the front door.
We’re not going to talk to anyone, and if someone asks why we’re here, we’re just going to keep moving.
It’s rude, but it’s also the best way to make sure no one else is in a position to get hurt tonight. Do you all understand?”
General murmurs of assent rise from the group.
“Until we’re down, I’m in charge,” says Erin. “Once we’re in the lab, I’ll hand things off to Kelpie and Lilianne, as our resident almost-alchemists, but until then, you listen to me, and you treat my orders like your own idea. Understand?”
Again, murmurs of assent. Even Lilianne joins in, too afraid of Erin’s fierce glare to stay silent.
“Then we go. Be careful, be quick, and don’t get dead.”
“Some motivational speech, huh?” asks Smita, seeming to appear at Lilianne’s elbow. Lily manages not to jump, but only barely, and the two of them wind up at the rear of the group as everyone starts moving down the alley, following Erin’s lead.
“I’ve heard worse,” says Lilianne.
“That’s terrifying.”
Lilianne starts to laugh, then thinks better of it and clamps down. Smita bumps her shoulder with her own.
“Hey. This works better if we look natural,” she says. “So laugh. Relax. We just need to get out of the open and this all goes much faster.”
Erin is leading them into the apartment complex Lilianne noticed before; it’s one of those open-air designs that only really seem to exist in places like California, where the weather never goes beyond a certain severity.
The apartment doors face a central courtyard, shielded by small awnings but otherwise fully exposed to the elements.
Some of the tenants have barbeque grills outside their doors, crammed in alongside window-mounted air-conditioning units.
It’s the middle of the day, and the central courtyard is entirely deserted, although Lilianne can’t stop herself from glancing at the open curtains of the windows they pass, waiting for someone who actually lives here to jump out and start chiding them for trespassing.
Erin leads them unhesitatingly across the green central area to an apartment door sandwiched between a stairwell and a door marked LAUNDRY.
She tests the knob and, finding it locked, hisses between her teeth as she lets go and steps back, turning to Roger. “You’re up,” she informs him.
He steps forward, eyeing the doorknob sternly as he reaches for it. “I can see that you’re a little stuck, but that’s all it is,” he says. “I know you’re not locked against me. That would be unbelievably rude.”
When he twists the knob, it turns easily enough, and the door swings inward, revealing an empty living room with white-painted walls and an industrial beige carpet. Erin nods to him.
“Respect,” she says, and steps inside, heading for the hallway at the back of the room. One by one the others file after her, with Smita pausing long enough to close the door.
The air in the living room smells of fresh paint, cleaning solvents, and—very faintly, in the distance—alkahest. This place is definitely connected to the lab, no matter how distantly. Lilianne’s mouth is suddenly dry, her heart beating too fast as she follows the others down the hall.
Past the open bathroom door, Erin opens what looks like a closet, revealing instead a flight of stairs descending down into the dark.
“I tagged along the last time the management showed this apartment to a potential renter, and when they opened this door, they saw shelves. Or at least they acted like they did. They said it was plenty of room for all their linens, anyway. I sort of wonder what happens if they ever rent this place out, and the new tenants start just shoveling their towels into the abyss.”
“They couldn’t see the stairs?” asks Smita.
“Too much alchemy went into building them,” says Erin. “It’ll be years before anyone outside the alchemical world can see them. Longer if we don’t clean up whatever’s keeping the lab awake and active below us.”
“What fun alchemy is,” says Smita.
“What fun indeed,” says Erin, and steps onto the stairs.
Again, they all follow her, like a little line of self-destructive ducklings willingly descending down into the dark.
The lab is definitely awake, and getting more awake by the minute. Once they’re all on the stairs and the door is closed behind them, lights come on, pale and lambent at first, but rapidly brightening until they fill the entire stairwell with bright, sterile illumination, hurting Lilianne’s eyes.
Kelpie sighs, shoulders slumping slightly.
Artemis puts a hand on her back, right between the shoulder blades, and Kelpie flashes her a grateful smile.
“Sorry,” she says. “It’s just that for the longest time, I thought this was what light was supposed to be.
This was all that I knew until I got away. ”
“We can go back,” says Artemis, voice low and urgent. “You just say the word and we’ll go back. You and me. We can get the hell out of Berkeley for a little while, go and see the redwoods or something along the coast, whatever you want—”
“I want to finish this,” says Kelpie firmly. “Whatever that means, that’s what I want. I can’t run away again. We all saw how that worked out the last time I did it.”
Artemis looks pained, but she nods, and she descends the stairs a step behind Kelpie, the two of them staying close together.
And the others follow, Erin ceding the lead to the Lunars, who seem to know where they’re going, or at least have an idea of what they’re going to do when they get there.
The stairs are wide and relatively shallow, making it easy to descend.
Lilianne stays near the wall, ready to brace herself if something happens or rises to attack them. She can’t put it past this place.
This was all she was dreaming of when she came to Berkeley, and now it feels like she’s descending back into a nightmare.
They’ve gone at least three full flights down before they see the first real signs that the lab has truly been abandoned: the lights in the walls flicker and fail for a full twenty steps, leaving them to walk through a gray, grimy twilight zone lit only by the light radiating from above them and rising up from below.
Still they keep moving, and the unnatural channel the alchemists have opened in the earth rises up to swallow them all whole.
Lilianne loses count of the steps long before they reach the bottom of the stairs.
Each flight is no more than twenty steps, followed by a short landing and a sharp turn to the next descending flight.
About half the landings have doors, but Kelpie passes them all up, indicating that their destination is still somewhere farther down.
The only thing worse than the thought of how far they’ve already descended is the thought of climbing back up them again.
“I can’t feel my thighs,” she complains to Smita, as they continue moving downward. “I’m starting to think the way through the sewer wasn’t all that bad.”
“Agreed,” says Smita. “But whether we can use it or not is going to depend on what time it is when we’re done here—and how many monsters we’ve encountered. Too many, and I’m not going into a sewer for anything, not even to avoid all these damn stairs.”
“There’s an elevator,” says Kelpie.
Smita stares at her. “Why didn’t you say so before?” she demands.
“Because there’s no way we can use an elevator when we don’t know whether the lab is safe,” says Kelpie, tone reasonable.
“If we got in and the cable snapped, I don’t think even Roger could negotiate with the laws of physics fast enough to keep us all from getting splattered across the bottom of the elevator shaft. ”