“What’s next?” Herza asked, her second question of the journey.
CHAPTER 79
The Green Warehouse
Jack leaned over the edge of the roof, looking for people and finding a few still out in the open. But he could not recognize any of the bookgroup witches, and no one else out there moved. They had become obsidian sculptures locked in attitudes of walking, running, or just standing, arms held up as if beseeching someone, something—anything. “Are they all like that?” Jack asked.
Daniel had no answer but felt a twinge…an unwelcome jab of concern. He could see through many of
the buildings, as if their reality had been frozen mid-collision. Some of these were slowly fading, crumbling—turning to more black dust.
He rubbed his temples vigorously, then bent over, fighting off a headache. “I’m not smart anymore, Jack. This has me squeezed flat. Every secret, every bit of knowledge—it’s right before our eyes, and we don’t know what it means,” he said. “I used to be an arrogant bastard—from what I remember, which isn’t much. Maybe I belong with Glaucous, and you should stay away from both of us. I’m sorry I brought him here with me.”
Jack could say nothing in response. Their past was gone—literally gone, deleted, absorbed, powdered away. What could they be responsible for now? What sort of freedom of action or choice could they possibly have?
Ginny took just enough time to pluck her stone out of its box, throw the box between some heavy crates, and pull a bundle of clothes and a can of beans, all she thought they could spare, from under the bed. Enough was more than enough. She couldn’t sit still another second—couldn’t waste any more time waiting for the others to finish their enigmatic preparations.
She had slept through the departure of the three witches. She did not see Ellen in the stacks or near the outer door. She did not want to see Jack or Daniel, and she certainly did not want to encounter Glaucous again.
Or Bidewell.
She was going to do what she always did best: turn left, move on, make the wrong decision. Leaving the security of Bidewell’s warehouse—if it wassecure, which she had always doubted—seemed foolish, but now more than ever she couldn’t stand the thought of falling asleep again and dreaming of her lost other. She worked her way through the stacked boxes, smelling their dry mustiness, feeling the strange new cold that wafted through the lofty old building, winding like an invisible vapor down the aisles and between the rooms, chilling the steel doors like frozen hands, reaching in, searching…
The stone felt warm and heavy in her pocket. All the lightness after her hours in the empty room, the time spent with Mnemosyne, had collapsed under the weight of troubled sleep, and now she felt only leaden desperation.
She pushed open the outer door, cringing at the squeal it made, and pulled the mechanical lever that released the gate lock now that the city’s electricity was gone. The cold on the ramp was stranger and more intense than in the warehouse, and the brown, dusty darkness beyond the gate more forbidding than she had imagined while making her preparations.
But this was the way it had to be. Separation, escape, in the hopes of a new uniting—when they were ready, when they were mature.
Whatever they could have time to grow into.
With damp fingers she rolled the stone in her jacket pocket—the jacket that Bidewell had given her, a heavy woolen British Air Force coat, sixty years old or more—and used her other hand to pull the wire gate inward.
The last scatter of writhing clouds were lit with arcs of pale green and yellow flame that flickered and passed overhead, like the northern lights, she thought, but more intense—and not at all lovely. Above the clouds, the sky had become a vault of nothing. She should not look up, she decided. Yet looking at the streets outside—the shaved, dissected, rearranged buildings, covered with crawling black ice, the few people left behind by Terminus, petrified, contorted, filled with that same waxy, crawling ice—awful! So she kept her eyes on her feet and walked as quickly as the thickening air allowed. She seemed to fill a kind of bubble, an unseen protected volume that pushed ahead and around her. The bubble might be an effect of the stone, but she couldn’t know for sure. It was like a pocket of air dragged below the surface of a pond by a diving beetle. It might give out at any moment, and the waxy dark ice would fill her veins and then something else would peer out through her blind eyes…
She looked back, a bad idea, but she couldn’t help herself. The gray air behind could not completely obscure the sharp bluish glow rising from the warehouse, the only building she could see that had not been destroyed or rearranged like a child’s set of blocks. She wished them well. The warehouse grew smaller too quickly, as if each step she made were a dozen. A new way to walk: tattered running shoes turned into seven-league boots…
Ginny lifted her arms, wondering if she could will herself to fly, but nothing happened. She kept walking. The ground changed from cracked cement and asphalt to soft gray dirt, then to something blacker and harder—a kind of ropy crust like old lava, but thin and crunchy. She hoped the fine gray dust that puffed up from beneath the broken crust would not swallow her feet, or swallow her. Some of her thoughts as she performed this odd journey were taken up with the protests of a rational, practical young woman who told her that leaving the warehouse was worse than suicide—but who also told her that none of this could possibly be real. In the broken, flat, and listless world of Terminus—a thin coat of paint between life and doom—there had to be an answer to the madness, an escape, a door or hatch through which she could crawl and pull herself into real sunlight, real night, walk under real stars, real moon—
Real sleep, normal dreams. And a real city, not this broken-down jumble. But then she looked up from her blur of feet, looked around again. She was no longer in the city. The brown and gray air was reddened by the rise of the flaming arc—all that seemed to be left of the sun, wrapped around a cindery disc. This was accompanied by a deep rumbling and trembling beneath her shoes, the black ground itself rebelling against what now passed for day. And off in the distance she saw the ghostly hint of a sweeping beam, not precisely a searchlight, more like the blade of a huge sword cutting through the sky.
I know that. The Witness.
This made her stop. She found herself actually wringing her hands, a story-time gesture she never would have believed herself capable of. But she took some solace from the repetitive motion and the pressure of her strong, curling fingers.
Her frown deepened, wrinkles and seams growing across her forehead and cheeks until her face felt like an old, old woman’s. The air seemed to be aging her. Terminus might be pulling her up short, abruptly
snipping her world-line like a grim, silent Norn.
Anything could be happening.
And so she had to keep walking.
From the middle of the roof the shelter door creaked and slammed open. Ellen kicked the door again as it swung back, then stepped out onto the wooden pallets. “We weren’t watching her for just a moment…!” she called, and then stopped, sucked in her breath, and lifted her hand to shield her eyes against the aurora glow.
Jack didn’t say a word, just broke into a run over the wooden path to the shelter. His shoulders bounced from the walls, then he swung onto the ladder and scrambled below like a monkey. Daniel followed, more deliberate. Trying to figure an advantage, he thought with the smallest pang. Ellen stared at him as he walked past. She focused on his face—she did not want to see any more of the sky and landscape than she had to.
“The girl took off?” Daniel asked.
Ellen’s face was white with accumulated shock, and now this. She folded her arms tight and nodded.