Empire of Bones (34 page)

Antigone waited in the moonlight beside the platform that held their airplane on the nose of the S.S.
Fat Betty
. The engines were roaring. Diana was wearing headphones and checking instruments by the glowing yellow light of the cockpit. Horace was waiting in the plane.

Antigone looked at the rustling palm trees on the crescent island. This would have been a nice place to stay. Maybe someday. Maybe never. She smelled orangutan and turned back to see Jerome knuckling his way toward her. The great ape dropped down beside her and turned his eyes toward the island to see what she saw. He looked as serious as a poet.

“It’s been nice, Jerome,” Antigone said. “Though I wish I was in a bed right now and not getting back on a plane.”

Jerome was silent.

“You take care of my mom, all right?” Antigone tried to meet the ape’s eyes. “If bad people come, throw them in the ocean.”

From beneath the trees, Lemon emerged, walking beside Dan and Katie Smith. Nolan trailed behind with a long and obviously heavy duffel bag over his shoulders.

Antigone forced a yawn to loosen her tightening throat. She was not going to cry. Her mom would be safe. There was absolutely nothing to cry about.

Katie Smith, as slender and silver as an aspen tree in the moonlight, moved ahead of the others, straight for her daughter. Her eyes were lit like lesser moons, and the darkness in their centers pulled at Antigone like they were trying to drag her into another place and another time.

Katie’s slender arms wound around her daughter. Lips found Antigone’s cheek.

“My Tigger,” Katie said. “Your father loved you more than life. And so do I.”

Antigone cried.

Katie Smith pulled back, cupping her daughter’s face in her hands. She smiled at Antigone, her eyes pouring out raw, unfiltered affection.

“I would rather that my daughter could sit and sing with me beside this warm sea, but in dark times, there are claims greater than a mother’s. Be wisdom for your brother, but trust his boldness.”

Antigone nodded. She had no words. Her mother kissed her on the forehead.

Dan stepped up beside his mother. His face was pale, and he looked sick to his core.

“Antigone …”

“I don’t want to argue,” Antigone said. “I have to go.”

“Nothing in me wants to argue,” Dan said. “Everything in me wants to lock you in a room and go myself.”

“Well,” Antigone said, “thanks for being reasonable.”

Dan licked his lips. He was sweating and almost green.

“This isn’t reasonable,” he growled. “This is me trusting … trusting a girl who writes with fire on leaves. This is me trusting a ridiculous dream.”

Katie Smith shook her head. “True dreamers do not trust the dream. They trust the one who sends it.” She looked at Antigone. “Daniel is meant to stay. You are meant to go.”

Nolan climbed up past Antigone. He was wearing gloves and sneering with slight disgust. His heavy bag clattered with the unseen weapons that he, and no one else, had chosen.

Daniel put his hand on the back of Antigone’s head and pulled her into his chest. When he let go, her mother took her hands, kissed them each twice, then dropped them and backed away.

When the plane rose, when it banked away from the freighter with its gardens and its apes, when Antigone slid over the crescent island fringed with cliffs and trees and away from the shapes of her mother and brother and onto the road of silver moonlight over the sea, she felt like she had felt beside her father’s grave beneath that ancient redwood tree. Something was stretching inside her. Something was tearing. Something was already torn.

It wasn’t exactly the same. This time she felt like the one inside the grave while others stood beside it.

 seventeen 

LIVE BAIT

O
LIVER
L
AUGHLIN MASSAGED HIS EYEBROWS
. Outside, the sun would be rising, but he didn’t want to see it. Right now he needed things dim. His feet were up on a rusty handrail, and he was leaning back in a rickety bent-wood chair. Twenty feet below him, on the cracked concrete floor where large vats once burbled with Holy Soap, dozens of women were sleeping in neat rows.

Phoenix yawned, and then groaned. In his last body, the white Odyssean Cloak had magnified his mind and multiplied his cunning, but living in—no,
being
—Oliver was different. He had broken down barriers in the boy’s skull before he’d bothered to move in. He had doubled and trebled the boy’s capacity, pushing it well beyond mortal levels. But oddly, he hadn’t needed to do any real redesigning or even rebuilding. It had all just been there … walled off, unused, and more powerful than he could have imagined until he’d been able to think his way around inside it for himself.

Man, Phoenix felt, had been meant for tremendous
things. More than ever, as he cautiously explored Oliver’s new mind, Phoenix was certain that he was doing God’s work. Or gods’ work. Or more likely, the work of a god. He smiled.

It had been difficult at first—painful, even—to achieve his old levels. But his consciousness was flowing more easily through Oliver’s brain now. And there were still corners unexplored, potentials that Phoenix had not begun to touch. Psychic potentials. Telepathic potentials. Destructive, creative, invasive, and matter-altering potentials. Exploring them was like opening present after present on Christmas Day and always seeing more beneath the tree.

Phoenix smiled again. He thought of things like presents now. Oliver, after all, was much closer to childhood than Edwin Laughlin had been.

Of course, in addition to the thrill of discovery, testing each new ability gave Phoenix a headache that was equally beyond mortal capacity. His forehead felt like a double-barreled volcano ready to blast screaming tangled nerves out of his eyebrows.

Yes, he could turn off the pain—he’d done it in some varieties of his men—but not without turning off all of it. There would be a more delicate switch in there somewhere. He’d figure it out. Or his skull would adapt. Eventually.

“Father.”

Phoenix dropped his Oliver hands and looked up.

The angular red-haired man who loomed over him was one of the few of Phoenix’s failed creations. The rest of the failed had been thrown into early action at Ashtown. Phoenix had not mourned their destruction, though he had not expected such high casualties.

This man—Hal, his name was—was physically perfect on every level. But he was a worrier. And worriers made every strength a weakness.

“Father,” Hal said again. He scratched a freckled cheek. “We haven’t heard anything new from Ashtown. Do you think the transmortals suspect something?”

“Of course they suspect something,” Phoenix said. “But that won’t stop them. There is more than enough bait in those Burials to draw them.”

Hal cleared his throat. His gills fluttered. “I can’t help but wonder if including the tooth potion in the package for Radu was a mistake. They may be too scared of you to take the bait.”

Phoenix dropped his feet off the rail and thumped his chair down. He began to laugh, and then he grabbed his throbbing forehead.

“Scared? Radu Bey?” Phoenix stood. Hal took a quick step backward. “I have brandished a tiny weapon. I have threatened him meekly and shown that I am the one who feels fear.”

“But, Father …” The redhead’s gills flared, and his freckled green face flushed.

“He will sniff the bait,” Phoenix said. “He will circle. And then he will strike with the wrath of the old gods, and we and all the world will know.”

Phoenix stretched inside Oliver’s new mind. His skull hatched Phoenix’s influence out between his eyes.

Hal’s arm bent jerkily at the elbow. He extended one wavering finger and then tucked it into his own nostril. He stood there, eyes wide with terror.

“Stop picking your nose, Hal,” Oliver sneered.

Hal’s finger twisted and wiggled, picking diligently. Hal began to sweat and shake. He fought to lower his hand, but the finger popped right back into his nose.

“Hal,” Oliver said. “Your nose is bleeding.”

And it was. Streaming down around the man’s knuckles. Hal began to sob.

“Do not bring me such childish fears,” Oliver said coolly. “Bring me no fear at all. I gave you strength; find courage, you pitiful, gutless … 
human
.”

Hal turned and ran, his bloody hand suddenly free.

Oliver closed his eyes. His head was crackling. It felt like it was levering slowly open, yawning in his forehead. And as it did, his pain muted slightly, like a long splinter was being dragged out him, like his mind had just grown a new limb.

He had just made a grown man pick his own nose. Phoenix let Oliver’s mouth twitch into a smile.

Children could be so spiteful.

Cyrus stood on the belly of a huge stone statue, floating on its back in a quiet black sea. And that is how he knew it was a dream. Stone. Floating.

Cold wind tightened the skin on his face, but his body was warm. The stone statue beneath his feet wore carved mail and had outstretched sinewy arms. One hand gripped an ax and the other held the severed stone head of a bearded man. Cyrus walked up the statue’s belly and chest and the stone bobbed like a log, slapping the arms down into the dark water and rocking back up again.

Cyrus looked down at the stone face as it emerged from the water. He had expected a man. A king. A Viking chieftain, maybe. But the statue had the face of a woman. Not even a woman—a girl. A pretty girl. Her eyes were shut and her brows were low with worry. Her stone mouth was slightly open, like the mouth of a sleeper straining to speak. Black water trickled out between her lips. She wore no helmet, and instead of hair, long stone feathers erupted from her scalp.

“Do you see her?” The voice was Dan’s. Cyrus looked around. To his left, Dan was seated in a metal chair at a small metal table, both on the surface of the water. He was leaning forward, resting his head on his crossed arms. His eyes were shut, and a caged light hung in the air above him.

“Yeah,” Cyrus said. “I see her. I’m standing on her.”

“That’s how the dream goes,” Dan said. “She’s floating, right?”

“Yeah,” said Cyrus. He looked back down at the black water licking the stone. “Not friendly water.”

“Death,” Daniel said. He yawned, but his eyes were still shut. “The water is death.”

“Creepy,” said Cyrus. “And weird. I’m dreaming a floating statue and my brother napping at a table.” He smiled. “But now that I know I’m dreaming, I think I’ll fly away. Wanna come?”

“You’re not dreaming,” Dan said. “Well, you are. But it’s not your dream. It’s mine. I’m giving it to you. I thought you should see it.”

Raindrops started puckering the black water around Cyrus. A few slapped the statue. A fat one hit Cyrus in the ear. Not the top of his ear. Somehow, it shot right into his ear hole. He squeegeed at it with his little finger.

“That part’s all you,” Dan said. “Not me.”

“So if the rest is all you …”

“It is,” Dan said.

Cyrus stared at his napping brother. “Okay,” he said. “A couple things … First, it’s kind of creepy having you in my dream. Cool, yes. But also creepy. Second, why this? You thought I should see it, so what’s the point?”