The car lurched drunkenly as we passed beneath the old sign. The road looked like it had been bombed back to the Stone Age. Lena downshifted and did her best to avoid the worst of the gaping cracks and potholes.
The whole place had a post-apocalyptic feel. Graffiti covered the walls of the main plant and the various connected buildings. I spotted everything from simple gang tags to a full mural showing a stylized George Washington gunning down a field of robots, which was actually pretty awesome.
We passed what might have once been a warehouse, but was now little more than a blackened patch of cement surrounded by weeds. A few metal support beams jutted from the ground at the edges.
Weeds brushed the underside of the car as Lena pulled into a crumbled blacktop parking lot. I retrieved Smudge and climbed out. The movement reawakened the throbbing pain in my neck and head.
I adjusted the familiar weight of my armor-laden jacket, then grabbed the paper bag full of books out of the back of the car. The air here smelled like dandelions, clover, and urine. I strode past the nearest building. The outer wall was long gone, and the pillars within the three-story structure made it feel like a parking garage.
An old, wooden boat with a cracked hull and peeling paint had been dragged inside. It looked like someone had dumped it here, where it had been repurposed into a makeshift shelter.
“This place was the cutting edge of modern technology during World War II, rolling out bombers and other military hardware,” said Lena.
Glass, wood, and rubble crunched under my feet. We cut through the corner of the building and emerged into a courtyard of sorts. Brick walls rose up on two sides. Little grew here, the ground being smothered in a layer of debris and red bricks. Green vines climbed the far wall, nearly reaching the top of the three-story building.
I brushed off a broken slab of cement and sat carefully on the edge, then turned Smudge loose to hunt. This place was pretty much an all-you-can-eat buffet for a creature who lived on insects. He was relatively cool to the touch, which was reassuring.
I pulled a book from my jacket and used it to create a gold-plated handgun.
“What are you doing?”
I gripped the gun with both hands, sighted in on a patch of bare earth, and pulled the trigger twice. Dirt and pebbles sprayed the air, and Smudge flared into a tiny torch. He settled down quickly, though not before giving me a nasty eight-eyed glare.
“Signaling to anyone here that this is a good time to make themselves scarce.” I set down the gun and grabbed the first book from the paper bag. This was an older fantasy novel by Fred Saberhagen, and included a magical sword with the power to kill anyone, anywhere in the world.
“You haven’t told me what you’re doing,” Lena said.
I read the first few pages, searching for the tingle of magic. I felt nothing but the unpleasant jolt of the lock. “A locked book is magically useless to anyone except maybe Gutenberg himself, but not even he should be able to use its power. Not unless he first rips away that lock.”
I set the Saberhagen aside and picked up the next book, Mira Grant’s Feed. “Magic 101.” I skimmed the opening scene. “Libriomancy works because we can create identical copies of a text. That generates a kind of magical resonance between books. Libriomancers essentially reach into every copy of a book at once in order to access the cumulative belief of readers.”
Feed was locked as well, thankfully. I wasn’t up for fighting a worldwide zombie epidemic this week. I set it aside and reached for a Soviet-era thriller called Rabid, by C. H. Shaffer, in which a Russian scientist develops a new, weaponized version of the rabies virus.
I hadn’t read this one, but as I ran my fingers down the opening pages, magic sparked through my bones, making me yelp. I tried again, pressing harder until my fingers pierced the paper.
I could feel the tattered remains of the lock, but it didn’t stop me from accessing the book’s magic. Block- printed Latin text swirled beneath my skin. I had never been able to read the text of a magical lock before. Excitement pushed everything else aside as I concentrated on the words. “Et magicae artis adpositi erant derisus et sapientiae gloriae correptio cum contumelia.”
“Which means?” Lena asked impatiently.
“‘And the delusions of their magic art were put down, and their boasting of wisdom was reproachfully rebuked.’ Gutenberg used the Bible to lock this book.”
I pressed deeper. It was like reaching through a broken window. I could touch the book’s magic, but the lock jabbed and sliced my flesh as I did. I slowly withdrew my fingers. My skin was undamaged, but my joints felt cold and stiff.
I turned the book over to read the summary. The heroine was a beautiful doctor working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She was the first to diagnose the new form of rabies, making her a target for Russian spies. I skimmed the back, then flipped through the final chapter, searching for any mention of a vaccine or cure. “Nothing,” I whispered. “They burn down the Russian lab and irradiate the last samples. CIA guy gets shot, but it’s just a flesh wound. Meaning this book could be used to create a highly contagious and deadly virus, one with no known cure.”
“Can you lock it again?”
Now that I had seen how Gutenberg did it… I shook my head. “I’d need more time to study, and even if I did, what’s to stop him from ripping open the rest?” I wiped my hands on my jeans. “But I can use this book to find him.”
Lena sat down beside me, resting her twin bokken on her thighs. “This is what Nidhi tried to warn you against, isn’t it? What will it do to you?”
“I have no idea. I’ve never done it before.” I held up Rabid. “Imagine magic as a frozen lake, one which coexists with the world around us. The book is the auger that helps us drill through the surface, and that hole gives definition to the energy beneath.”
“Magic as ice fishing. That’s different.”
“Every copy of this book chips away at the same hole, including the one our killer has been working with.”
“You can spy on him through that hole? Through your copy of the book?”
“In theory.” It violated half the rules of libriomancy, but there was precedent. “Gutenberg did it once, back in World War II. He used a copy of Mein Kampf to gather intelligence about the Germans. Every copy of the book becomes a kind of magical bug.” As I understood the story, that experience had come dangerously close to killing him. Drowning him, to extend the metaphor. Magical objects dissolved back into energy when returned to their books. What would happen to my mind if I lost my mental grip and slipped beneath the ice?
The only consolation was that I probably wouldn’t last long enough to know I had failed.
“I know that look,” Lena said. “What aren’t you telling me? How am I supposed to help if I don’t know-”
“You can’t help,” I snapped, and instantly regretted it. I opened the book and started reading.
Lena plucked it out of my hands and read the back. “So what’s the risk? Are you going to infect yourself with this virus? If so, we can find another way. I’m not watching you die.”
I shook my head. “The danger isn’t physical. Even if I succeed… there’s a possibility that something might come back through me.”
“You’re worried about being possessed, like Gutenberg?”
I didn’t bother trying to snatch the book away from her. “If I do this, we have a shot at finding him. If I lose myself, you can drag my body back to the vampires. All I know is that if I don’t try, Doctor Shah dies.”
Lena stiffened. She gripped the book with both hands. For a moment, I thought she might refuse to return it. A part of me hoped she would. But she reached out, offering the book back to me.
Neither of us spoke. There was no need.
I blinked, trying to concentrate on the story. The opening was fast-paced, full of danger and tension as emergency room doctors tried to save a patient from a nearby university who had been infected with an early form of the virus. As I read, the pages grew warmer. I imagined the characters’ voices, the shouts as the patient turned violent, trapped in the terror of fever-induced hallucinations. Tears streamed down his face, and he sprayed spittle as he screamed. He struck a nurse and jumped off of the gurney, only to collapse as his legs gave way. From the shadows, a figure in a dark suit calmly documented it all.
I gradually allowed my fingertips to melt into the page. The pain of Gutenberg’s broken magic wasn’t as sharp this time. So long as I moved slowly, I could keep from crying out. My hand sank to the wrist. At this point, I could have taken anything I wanted from the story: weapons, medicine, infected blood… “So far, so good.”
