The Interminables (13 page)

“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.

I
stvan scrabbled after them
, his vision narrowed to twin blurs, a mad dash through the semblance of his home city draped over Hell. Glassy tendrils reached for him, whispering in a dozen languages. Chasms yawned on every side. Buildings ended where they shouldn't; men and women strolled past, clad in his era, like dolls. The emptiness suffocated, smothered, spun apart, whirled into spinning vertigo, and he feared he might come apart with it. Nothing. Nothing, nothing....

Edmund was straight ahead, a mirage of dark silk and faded gold. Not gone – not even mired in such horrors – but distinctly distant, skimming like a fish just below the water's surface. It was all Istvan had. He'd promised he would follow him. He was following. He would follow him anywhere.

They finally reached the wall.

Not wood. Not brick. This was a vast pile of concrete and corrugated steel seven hundred feet high, rough and angular and held together by crude rivets. It curved outward like the hull of a battleship as it rose, terminating in spiked battlements and some sort of radio antennae: strange, twisted, nonsensical structures of bent wire. Faint seams suggested folding panels. The metal was painted in bright reds and yellows, marked every few dozen feet with slogans in English or Spanish or both that read things like “Against the Control,” and “Free Thought Deserves Protection.” Turrets the size of railway cars, mounted far above, rumbled just below the threshold of hearing as they rolled on their bearings.

Barrio Libertad. Forbidden territory, floating in a sea of terrors.

Istvan stumbled beside Edmund and stayed right by him as they approached the entrance. It was barred, but unguarded. Flanked by two murals. The first depicted fists of every color raised against a pale, amorphous entity composed of reaching tentacles and hints of human faces. The second depicted a shattered lantern, brilliant white light spilling from behind rose-tinted glass. Both were blocky and stylized, laid out with mechanical precision. As Grace approached, the doors between them slid sideways with an electric whine and the pounding of powerful motors. Beyond lay a cavernous elevator.

No one to greet them. Helpful raised lettering on one wall suggested that passengers keep all limbs inside the conveyance, followed by what Istvan assumed to be a similar note in Spanish.

Grace walked in, propping Lucy in a corner and leaning against the wall opposite the notice. Edmund followed her, and Istvan followed him, perversely grateful for Edmund's old, distinctive terrors: their richness was bracing, their mere existence confirmation that Istvan hadn't lost his senses entirely. A focal point. An anchor. That single light in the darkness.

Grace had her own miasma, he supposed, but that wasn't the same.

The doors clanged shut behind them. A boom, like a weight released, and then the elevator rumbled downwards.

No music.

Grace said nothing. Edmund said nothing. The floor, it seemed, was the most interesting part of the elevator, and neither one of the former lovers had any comment to make on it.

Istvan stayed where he was, so close to Edmund they were nearly touching, and glanced back and forth between the two while trying to pretend he was doing nothing of the sort. They must have spoken during the walk. Only a walk, for them, through a nightmare they couldn't perceive. Grace, much as before, radiated hard resignation, regret, and disappointment, self-loathing she did her best to bury... but Edmund...

Grief. Confusion. A longing, seven years seasoned, old wounds ripped open by a woman's claws.

Istvan wished he didn't feel quite so relieved. So vindicated. Grace was nothing but trouble and she always had been. Edmund had to realize that, now. Poor bastard.

Istvan touched his arm.

Edmund muttered, but Istvan knew he didn't believe it.

“Rude,” said Grace.

Istvan opened his mouth in retort – and paused. It was faint, but he thought he could detect the barest hint of other emotions somewhere beyond the elevator's walls. Real, feeling, suffering, human beings. Particularly anger, which was odd, but in an enclosed populace...

Then, it was as though they crossed a threshold. The whispering presence around him vanished, wiped away as though it had never existed. A weight – no, a pressure, more omnipresent, pressing in from every direction – lifted. But, more importantly, there was pain. Less than in Big East – far less – but to Istvan's starved perceptions it was a great rush of distraction and distrust and despair and domestic annoyance, a grand bounty of human experience laid before him like a flight of wines. The anger was almost overpowering, an acid edge to every interaction, but even that was preferable to nothing. Vastly, vastly preferable.

He laughed in abject relief, leaning into Edmund's side. Oh, to be awash once more in life and living!

Grace edged away, and her fear was icing. “Eddie, remind me again how he's not a B-movie villain.”

The elevator shuddered to a halt.

“Good afternoon,” crackled a man's voice, though there was no speaker – human, mechanical, or otherwise – in sight. “Welcome to the neighborhood-fortress of Barrio Libertad. State your business, please. It is r- recommended that you consider your current position in a small box suspended over a fall of one hundred forty-two meters.” A pause. The statement repeated itself in Spanish. The voice was heavily accented, hesitating in odd places and shot through with static.

“It's me,” Grace said. “One to beam up. And... guests.”

“Yes,” came the reply.

The elevator began moving again.

A
short tunnel
awaited them at the bottom, as ramshackle as the walls and lit by strips of orange set deeply into the roof. A team of people with a stretcher rolled up, calling for the smiler, congratulating Resistor Alpha on another successful retrieval.

Then they stopped, staring at Edmund. The Hour Thief? What was the Hour Thief doing here? A wizard? He knew about Diego's stance on magic, didn't he? How did he get past the interdiction?

Edmund tipped his hat to them. Istvan had gone invisible, claiming that he didn't want to start a panic, and Edmund had agreed: under the circumstances, the Hour Thief alone was bad enough. No need to make it look like an invasion.

I'm not an army
, Istvan said.

I think they would prefer an army
, Edmund said.

Grace waved. Smiled. Handed Lucy over with a gentleness that Istvan asserted she had never shown in her previous encounter with the woman. Explained that the Hour Thief was here because he was Lucy's target and therefore permitted – he was the one the Susurration had taken such a powerful interest in, according, again, to Diego. Whoever the man was, she seemed to think highly of him.

Edmund had a sinking feeling about the whole business.

Once Lucy was taken away – for healing, deprogramming, and rehabilitation, Grace claimed – he and Istvan were finally permitted to leave the elevator. Faint seams in the tunnel walls trembled but didn't split as they passed, marking protective panels mounted over who-knew-what. Edmund didn't ask. Istvan stayed close by him, which was both European and understandable under the circumstances.

The afternoon sun awaited them at journey's end, its glare blazing high over the dark curve of the far wall.

Grace backed up before them, holding out her hands. “Gentlemen... Doctor Czernin... welcome to Barrio Libertad.”

Edmund squinted. He tilted the brim of his hat down.

Then he reached for the nearest rail as the fortress proper swam into sight.

Dante's Hell. That was the first image that came to mind. Enormous, circular, terrace after broad terrace dug into the earth. Not underground, but in shadow. A tangle of walls and stairs and walkways, homes stacked ten or fifteen high, a perilous maze of corrugated steel, plaster, and adobe painted dozens of different hues. Vast buttresses anchored entire blocks, soaring upwards to the highest terrace and beyond. Rails larger than locomotives ran across the upper edge of the walls, gears and wheels anchoring metal sheets that folded over and across each other like the sails of a steel armada. Strings of lights hung suspended over his head, sloping gently down to a central plaza ringed with mural-covered colonial buildings. The fortress boomed: wind striking the walls, the metallic creaking of gantry cranes, a faint dull thudding he couldn't place.

Something was missing, and after a moment he realized what it was. No cracks. No fallen masonry, no scaffolding, no half-tumbled buildings. No earthquake damage at all.

“Well?” Grace said with a broad grin, “What do you think?”

Edmund leaned over the rail. Yes, that was a garden down there. Or, given the distance, an entire farm. “It's... something.”

Istvan peered up at the walls. “Is there a reason everything is covered in spikes?”

“Diego's Chilean. It's the style.” Grace started up a nearby set of stairs. “He claims he based the place on his home city, and that it isn't a work of art, because he doesn't do art. He's so wrong.” She pushed open a door. “Come on, we're going up.”

Edmund picked his way after her, not feeling any better. The rumors had never mentioned a Diego as the architect, but they had never mentioned Grace, either. Diego or Grace. Diego and Grace. The conjunctions made all the difference.

Istvan stayed right beside him. he said.

The door led to a box, a tiny room with windows open to the air. Edmund leaned out the nearest, grateful for the view. The contraption sat on a near-vertical rail strung with frighteningly thin cables. It was a long way up... and a long way down.

Istvan took one look at it, said something about transporting wounded men the same way during vicious fighting in the Alps, and announced he'd ride up top. Edmund didn't dispute it. Grace shut the door behind her – she'd insisted Edmund enter first, because he clearly wouldn't know how to lock the device – and banged on the wall. The box started upwards with a creak.

“Cable car,” she said. She hung out one of the windows, arms folded on the sill. “Welcome to the city of tomorrow.”

“It's something,” he repeated. Hat off, he propped his elbows on the window beside her.

“Don't do that.”

“Why?”

She grinned. “You'll unbalance the car and flip us off the rails into the abyss.”

He stepped away. He didn't believe her, but... well, it was probably better to humor her. “What happens to Lucy?” he asked, staring out the window instead of at her. Trying to. “Is she allowed to leave after she recovers or are these walls one-way?”

A shrug. “She probably won't stay, but most do. Most people never feel safe outside, knowing that the Susurration's out there waiting for them. That if it really wanted it could find them again. Take them again.” She readjusted her copper circlet. “Think of it like agoraphobia. You start needing walls.”

“I see.”

A string of lights rolled past, round bulbs that glowed a soft white-gold.

“Besides,” Grace continued, “the Barrio's not so bad. We're completely self-contained – own food, own water, own power, everything, and it's all reliable. Black box, but reliable.”

“Black box?”

She looked at him like he was stupid. It was a look that wasn't wholly unfamiliar. “Put something in the box, something else comes out of the box, no one has a clue what happens inside the box. Like your phone, Eddie, but for us future people.”

Edmund leaned against the opposite window. In the old days, she would have teased him mercilessly: for the rescue, for his age and infirmity, for his reliance on the magic she claimed could be understood, if you only looked hard enough. She would have washed away the Susurration's horrors with wit and words. Reduced it to a threat that was beatable, with an eye you could spit in. She'd believed that anything could be beaten. Anything could be solved. Anyone could be saved.

We all make mistakes.

“Diego's an engineer, too?” he asked.

She turned back to her view of the fortress. “You have no idea.”

They sighed to a halt just below the upper rails, shadowed by the enormous sheets of metal folded against them. Every inch looked worn, old and used, like the mechanisms had been in service for decades.

Grace motioned him out of the cable car. A rickety catwalk led to another tunnel hollowed in the wall, and then to a round of circular stairs. Edmund focused on his feet: the steps were so narrow they more resembled the rungs of a ladder, and the stairwell so steep it came close to being one. Around and around.

Grace didn't speak. Edmund didn't know how to begin. Istvan waited for them four stories up, having managed only a few yards before losing patience with conventional methods.

Grace threw open a hatch in the roof.

Edmund took his bearings. They were on top of the wall, a broad expanse like the deck of a battleship. One of the turrets loomed nearby, the slow tick-tick-tick of odd mechanisms now audible over the deep rumbling of its motors. Close up, it resembled a conventional maritime gun, only superficially – Edmund had seen enough of those in the Pacific theater to know. Beside it ran a narrow catwalk, and beyond that…

A vast grid of identical shelters, encircling the fortress as far as he could see. Acres of white canvas. No structure taller than two stories. The streets were dust, pounded flat, heaps of rubble piled around squares of rough farmland and pushed into once-molten wastes, stone frozen into bubbled whorls of black and grey. People – not all human – sorted through the remnants. Tiny figures worked the fields. No one seemed to be resting, or talking. Hundreds of thousands, Grace had said. Trapped, not because the fortress wouldn't let them in, but because their own minds wouldn't let them out.