Codex Born (36 page)

“Wait, you know what they are?” For two months I had pored over old manuscripts and reports, trying to piece together fragments of information and rumors going back five centuries. Meanwhile, Guan Feng knew our enemy by name.

“Some are students of Bi Sheng who lost their way. Their books were destroyed, or their readers neglected their duties. Others…we don’t know. The ghosts existed before Bi Sheng’s time. Throughout the years, there have been attempts to control them and the power they command.”

She turned to the computer and attacked the keyboard with two fingers. A short time later, she opened up a translated
Tang Dynasty poem by Dù Hàorán titled “Waiting for my Teacher to Return From the Land of Midday Dreams.” She scooted to the side so I could read.

“‘Dark clouds grow thin, and the song shall summon the dead to war.’” The poem described a sorcerer named Yuan Jiao and her battle against a man who had drowned in the river of magic. The man’s ghost had returned, far more powerful than before. He sought to drag others down. Yuan Jiao set forth into the Land of Midday Dreams, where she battled the ghost for seven days. But the more she fought, the stronger he became.

I thought about my hallucinations earlier this morning, how I had attacked Lena without recognizing her. Midday Dreams, indeed. I had come close to losing myself in Detroit, drowning in my own magic. That was when the devourer had struck.

“What will happen to Bi Wei?” I asked.

“She spent five hundred years adrift in the river of magic. That river flows through her now. It gives her tremendous power, but the first time she loses control, the ghosts will pull her down.” She stomped one foot on the floor. “August Harrison dismissed the dangers as ‘ignorant fears born of Oriental folklore and superstition.’ He and his dryad will turn our ancestors into vessels for the Army of Ghosts.”

Lena went rigid. “His dryad?”

“Wei pulled a single acorn from the book before Isaac destroyed it.” Guan Feng’s mouth tugged into a grim smile. “August was furious when Wei told him what you had done. He started swearing and talking about what he planned to do to punish you. But he had the acorn, and Bi Wei helped it to grow. The dryad was born hours after the attack on your archive, near St. Ignace. He named her Deifilia.”

Deifilia, meaning daughter of God. How egotistical could Harrison get?

Nidhi took Lena’s hand. “Do the others know what Harrison and the Army of Ghosts have done to Bi Wei?”

“They know, but they don’t believe. Some agree with Harrison.” Her nose wrinkled and her lips tightened, as if the
words soured her mouth. “The Army of Ghosts is little more than a legend, but Gutenberg and the Porters are real. We remember what the Porters did to our ancestors. Every time we read their books, we relive their fear as they watched Gutenberg’s ambition grow. They see Bi Wei’s power. She lived for years as a woman, but spent five centuries as a creature of magic. Her rebirth blended both lives. The others believe Harrison has given us the chance to not only restore our ancestors, but to fight back against the Porters.”

“What does August get in return?” Nidhi asked.

“His son. He believes Victor can be restored as Bi Wei was.”

From the way Nidhi stared, she obviously hadn’t expected that answer any more than I had.

Jeff was the first to speak. “How’s he expect to pull that off? Victor didn’t have one of those old books.”

“He hacked our network.” I spoke slowly, giving myself a chance to piece together what we knew. “He has Victor’s notes and reports. Magic was Victor’s life.”

“Would that be enough to bring him back?” asked Lena.

“Not by any magic we understand,” said Guan Feng. “The books must be printed and bound using the same materials, the same techniques. The individual’s words are encased by Bi Sheng’s magic. Computer files would not work. We’ve explained this to him, but he refuses to accept that his son is gone.” She looked at the floor. “And…we allowed him to hold on to that hope.”

“If he thinks there’s a chance, he’ll keep helping you,” Nidhi said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “August and Victor hated each other.”

“The dynamics of abuse are complicated and ugly.” Nidhi paced behind us. “August Harrison did unforgivable things to his wife and son, but there were moments of kindness as well. He taught Victor how to work with machines, how to build and repair circuit boards. Victor described moments of pride, even warmth and love. I imagine those were the moments Victor clung to when he sent the cicada to his father. But by the time
August arrived, he was too late to save his son. He might see that as his ultimate failure as a father.”

What would happen when he realized he couldn’t restore his son, that Bi Sheng’s magic couldn’t affect a collection of computer files any more than I could reach into…

“What?” asked Jeff.

I was already making a phone call. I browbeat the boy who answered into running out to make sure Jeneta was okay. If August Harrison had read my work, he knew Jeneta was his best option at turning electronic files into magic. I twitched impatiently until the boy confirmed Jeneta was out canoeing with the rest of the girls from her cabin.

“Great,” I said. “Tell her—” Dammit, her e-reader was destroyed, and I hadn’t had time to get her a new one. But she could work magic with her phone, too. “Tell her that poems can protect you from nightmares, and to make sure she has some ready.”

“You want me to give her a message about poetry?”

“It’s a librarian thing. She’ll understand.” I hung up and called Nicola Pallas next. “We need a Porter at Camp Aazhawigiizhigokwe. August might be going after Jeneta next.”

Pallas rarely wasted time on idle chitchat or pointless questions. “I can have a field agent there in twenty minutes. I believe Myron Worster is closest.”

“Thank you. If anything happens, have Myron get her out of there. Don’t try to fight.” I covered the mouthpiece and asked Guan Feng, “Are they still in St. Ignace?”

“We left the fort as soon as you destroyed the dryad’s book. I snuck away after we stopped for the night. I don’t know where Harrison meant to take Deifilia.”

I relayed that to Pallas, and promised to fill her in on the rest when she and Gutenberg arrived.

Guan Feng was twisting her hands into her pants. “I’ll tell you anything you want, but please give me back Bi Wei’s book. She struggles to hold on. Let me help her.”

“We will.” I rummaged through my own books. “Has Harrison been creating more wendigos?”

“Yes. He took two people from the fort yesterday, and talked of collecting others.”

“He killed a Porter,” I said. “He knows Gutenberg will be coming in force.” I donned my jacket and pulled another shock-gun from
Time Kings
. I shouldn’t have been doing magic so soon after ripping holes in
Nymphs of Neptune
, but sometimes the universe didn’t wait around for you to rest up. I knew the gun would take a wendigo down or cook one of his metal bugs. I was more worried about how to counter Bi Wei’s power.

The smell of burning dust rose from my shoulder. Smudge was watching the door, and waves of orange rippled over his thorax, dangerously close to my hair.

Nidhi saw it too. “Feng, is there any way you could have been followed?”

Comprehension and fear widened Guan Feng’s eyes, and she jumped to her feet. “I was careful. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I swear on my father’s grave.”

“He probably forced Bi Wei to tell him where you were.” I shoved the gun into my pocket, pulled on my jacket, and grabbed the rest of my books. “It’s all right. He would have found us anyway. I’m a little surprised the destruction of
Nymphs of Neptune
didn’t attract his swarm, but it sounds like he was busy practicing horticulture.”

Lena untwisted her cane into two sharpened swords and strode toward the door.

“How many?”

“Only one. But you might want to make sure you’ve got a change of underwear before you see this thing.”

Alex came around the desk to intercept me. “Isaac, tell your girlfriend she can’t bring weapons into
holy-shit-your-spider’s-on-fire!
”

I clapped him on the shoulder. “Alex, this would be a very good time for you to go on break. Somewhere else.”

Jeff had joined Lena by the door. Neither one of them moved. Not a good sign.

The scream of tearing metal filled the street, followed by
silence. I shoved past Alex toward the back and hurried to see what we were up against.

“All right,” I whispered. “I admit it. I’m impressed.”

I had been expecting to see Harrison, Bi Wei, and the dryad at a minimum, along with his insects. Possibly wendigos as well, depending on whether or not he was ready to announce his presence to the world.

I hadn’t expected a six-legged dragon made of old mining and construction equipment.

The thing was roughly the size of a bus. The yellow legs looked like they had come from mismatched backhoes. The mouth was a pair of toothed bulldozer blades. Heavy steel wings folded over the body to form an additional layer of armor.

The tail was perhaps the most terrifying. Imagine Paul Bunyan’s chainsaw. Disengage the chain and make it prehensile, then start whipping it through the streets of Copper River. As I watched, it peeled the roof from a parked car and gouged brick from the building beyond.

“Go on break,” whispered Alex. “Right.”

“I promise I’ll explain later.” Not that it would matter. If this thing didn’t kill us all, the Porters would be by to erase Alex’s memories, along with everyone else in town. So far, people were keeping off the street, but I saw faces pressed against windows, and at least two phones filming the carnage.

A gun went off from across the road, but the dragon didn’t appear to notice. Standing in the doorway of the barbershop, Lizzie Pascoe raised her hunting rifle to her shoulder and squeezed off another shot.

The dragon was more interested in the library. Thick steel cables flexed and tightened within its body as it charged.

The entire building shook, and a good chunk of the front wall crumbled away. I yanked out my shock-gun, switched it to maximum, and sent lightning crackling into the dragon’s mouth. The attack left a glowing orange patch of metal the size of a dinner plate, but the dragon didn’t even slow down. The tail swiped through the wall, destroying windows, books, and
the Back-to-School book display I had spent two hours putting together. Books and debris battered us all, and the shock-gun fell from my hand.

Lena hauled me toward the back of the library. Once there, I snatched
The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells
from my jacket and turned to “The New Accelerator.” I had been meaning to try this story for a while.

I struggled to focus on the words as enormous jaws ripped away part of the roof like it was made of cardboard. I kept remembering the ruins of the MSU library, reduced to a heap of crumbled brick and twisted metal. I was
not
going to let Harrison’s latest pet do that to my library. I reached into the story and pulled out a small, green phial of thick liquid.

“If Bi Wei and the others are here, they’ll be able to counter any magic you use,” Guan Feng warned.

“Sure,” I said. “If they’re fast enough.”

I transferred Smudge to the drinking fountain where he’d be less likely to set anything alight, then downed the potion and closed my eyes while I waited for the magic to take effect.

The sounds of battle slowed, then died completely. I opened my eyes again and strode carefully past my seemingly-motionless companions, releasing the phial over the trash can on my way out. It hovered in the air, its downward motion invisible to my hyperaccelerated eye.

Beneath the anger and, if I were honest, the overwhelming terror, a part of me was looking forward to this. It was the same part that cheered for every David-and-Goliath tale of underdogs triumphing over impossible odds and unbeatable foes.

It was time to slay a dragon.

Plato once said that human beings were created with two heads, four arms, and four legs, until Zeus split them in half. Ever since, humans have spent their lives searching for their other half, the one person who could complete them.

What a narrow-minded, messed-up, asinine system.

Do the math. There are more than seven billion people on this planet. Say you do a
lot
of traveling, and manage to meet a million of those people in your lifetime. That gives you a mere 1 in 7000 chance of finding “the one.”

Maybe that’s why they created me. To be their other half, the answer to the myth. Easier than scouring the planet for an impossible dream. Easier, too, than learning to set aside the dream and embrace a human being who is as flawed and imperfect as you.

Humans are so obsessed with true love, the perfect relationship. They imagine that one elusive person who fits their quirks and foibles and desires like a puzzle piece. And of course, when a potential mate falls short of that perfection, they reject them. They were too old, too young, too silly, too serious, too fat, too thin. They liked the wrong TV shows. They hated chocolate.
They voted for the other guy. They didn’t put the toilet seat down.