Fearful Symmetries (3 page)

“If I
want
—?”

Here she turned on
him,
abruptly equal-fierce, clearing her throat to hork a contemptuous wad out on the ground between them, like she was making a point. “Look, you think I give a runny jack-shit if you believe me or not?
I know what I know
. It’s just that things are gonna start to move fast from now on, so you need to know that;
somebody
in this crap-pit does, aside from me. And I guess—” Stopping and hissing, annoyed with herself, before adding, quieter: “I guess I wanted to just say it, too—out loud, for once. For all the good it’ll probably do either of us.”

They stood there a second, listening, Goss didn’t know for what—nothing but muffled wind, people murmuring scared out beyond the passage, a general scrape and drip. Till he asked: “What about Hynde? Can we, like,
do
anything?”

“Not much. Why? You guys friends?”

Yes, damnit
, Goss wanted to snap, but he was pretty sure she had lie-dar to go with her Seven-dar. “There’s . . . not really a show, without him,” was all he said, finally.

“All right, well—he’s pretty good and got, at this point, so I’d keep him sedated, restrained if I could, and wait, see who else shows up: there’s six more to go, after all.”

“What happens if they all show up?”

“All Seven? Then we’re fucked, basically, as a species. Stuck back together, the Maskim are a load-bearing boss the likes of which this world was not designed to contain, and the vector they form in proximity, well—it’s like putting too much weight on a sheet of . . . something. Do it long enough, it rips wide open.”

“
What
rips?”

“The crap you think? Everything.”

There was a sort of a jump-cut, and Goss found himself tagging along beside her as Camberwell strode back up the passageway, listening to her tell him: “Important point about Hynde, as of right now, is to make sure he doesn’t start doin’ stuff to himself.”

“. . . like?”

“Well—”

As she said it, though, there came a scream-led general uproar up in front, making them both break into a run. They tumbled back into the light-sticks’ circular glow to find Journee contorted on the ground with her heels drumming, chewing at her own lips—everybody else had already shrunk back, eyes and mouths covered like it was catching, save for big, stupid ’Lij, who was trying his level best to pry her jaws apart and thrust his folding pocket spork in between. Goss darted forward to grab one arm, Camberwell the other, but Journee used the leverage to flip back up onto her feet, throwing them both off against the walls.

She looked straight at Camberwell, spit blood and grinned wide, as though she recognized her:
Oh, it’s you. How do, buddy? Welcome to the main event
.

Then reached back into her own sides, fingers plunging straight down through flesh to grip bone—ripped her red ribs wide, whole back opening up like that meat-book Camberwell had mentioned and both lungs flopping out, way too large for comfort: two dirty grey-pink balloons breathing and growing, already disgustingly over-swollen yet inflating even further, like mammoth water wings.

The pain of it made her roar and jackknife, vomiting on her own feet. And when Journee looked up once more, horrid grin trailing yellow sick-strings, Goss saw she now had a sigil of her own embossed on her forehead, fresh as some stomped-in bone-bruise.

“Asakku, the Terrible Zemyel,” Camberwell said, to no one in particular. “Who desecrates the faithful.”

And: “God!” Somebody else—Lao?—could be heard to sob, behind them.

“Fuck Him,” Journee rasped back, throwing the tarp pinned ’cross the permanently open doorway wide and taking impossibly off up into the storm with a single flap, blood splattering everywhere, a foul red spindrift.

’Lij slapped both hands up to seal his mouth, retching loudly; Katz fell on his ass, skull colliding with the wall’s sharp surface, so hard he knocked himself out. Lao continued to sob-pray on, mindless, while everybody else just stared. And Goss found himself looking over at Camberwell, automatically, only to catch her nodding—just once, like she’d seen it coming.

“—like
that
, basically
,
” she concluded, without a shred of surprise.

Five minutes at most, but it felt like an hour: things narrowed, got treacly, in that accident-in-progress way. Outside, the dust had thickened into its own artificial night; they could hear the thing inside Journee swooping high above it, laughing like a loon, yelling raucous insults at the sky. The other two drivers had never come back inside, lost in the storm. Katz stayed slumped where he’d fallen; Lao wept and wept. ’Lij came feeling towards Camberwell and Goss as the glow-sticks dimmed, almost clambering over Hynde, whose breathing had sunk so low his chest barely seemed to move. “Gotta
do
something, man,” he told them, like he was the first one ever to have that particular thought. “
Something
. Y’know? Before it’s too late.”

“It was too late when we got here,” Goss heard himself reply—again, not what he’d thought he was going to say, when he’d opened his mouth. His tongue felt suddenly hot, inside of his mouth gone all itchy, swollen tight; strep? Tonsillitis? Jesus, if he could only reach back in there and
scratch
 . . .

And Camberwell was looking at him sidelong now, with interest, though ’Lij just continued on blissfully unaware of anything, aside from his own worries. “Look, fuck
that
shit,” he said, before asking her: “Can we get to the trucks?”

She shook her head. “No driving in this weather, even if we did. You ever raise anybody, or did the mikes crap out too?”

“Uh, I don’t think so; caught somebody talkin’ in Arabic one time, close-ish, but it sounded military, so I rung off real quick. Something about containment protocol.”

Goss: “
What
?”

“Well, I thought maybe that was ’cause they were doing minefield sweeps, or whatever—”

“When
was
this?”

“. . . fifteen minutes ago, when you guys were still down there, ’bout the time the storm went mega. Why?”

Goss opened his mouth again, but Camberwell was already bolting up, grabbing both Katz and Hynde at once by their shirt-collars, ready to heave and drag. The wind’s whistle had taken on a weird, sharp edge, an atonal descending keen, so loud Goss could barely hear her—though he sure as hell saw her lips move,
read
them with widening, horrified eyes, at almost the same split-second he found himself turning, already in mid-leap towards the descending passage—

“
—INCOMING, get the shit downstairs, before those sons of bitches bring this whole fuckin’ place down around our goddamn—
”

(ears)

Three hits, Goss thought, or maybe two and a half; it was hard to tell, when your head wouldn’t stop ringing. What he could only assume was at least two of the trucks had gone up right as the walls came down, or perhaps a shade before. Now the top half of the temple was flattened, once more indistinguishable from the mountainside above and around it, a deadfall of shattered lava-rock, bone-bricks and fossils. No more missiles fell, which was good, yet—so far as they could tell, pinned beneath slabs and sediment—the storm above still raged on. And now they were all down in the well-room, trapped, with only a flickering congregation of phones to raise against the dark.

“Did you have any kind of
plan
when you came here, exactly?” Goss asked Camberwell, hoarsely. “I mean, aside from ‘find Seven congregation site—question mark—profit’?”

To which she simply sighed, and replied—”Yeah, sort of. But you’re not gonna like it.”

“Try me.”

Reluctantly: “The last couple times I did this, there was a physical copy of the
Liber Carne
in play, so getting rid of that helped—but there’s no copy here, which makes
us
the
Liber Carne
, the human pages being Inscribed.” He could hear the big I on that last word, and it scared him. “And when people are being Inscribed, well . . . the
best
plan is usually to just start killing those who aren’t possessed until you’ve got less than seven left, because then why bother?”

“Uh huh . . .”

“Getting to know you people well enough to
like
you, that was my mistake, obviously,” she continued, partly under her breath, like she was talking to herself. Then added, louder: “Anyhow. What we’re dealing with right now is two people definitely Inscribed and possessed, four potential Inscriptions, and one halfway gone. . . .”

“Halfway? Who?”

She shot him that look, yet one more time—softer, almost sympathetic. “Open your mouth, Goss.”

“Why? What f—oh, you gotta be kidding.”

No change, just a slightly raised eyebrow, as if to say:
Do I look it, motherfucker?
Which, he was forced to admit, she very much did not.

Nothing to do but obey, then. Or scream, and keep on screaming.

Goss felt his jaw slacken, pop out and down like an unhinged jewel-box, revealing all its secrets. His tongue’s itch was approaching some sort of critical mass. And then, right then, was when he felt it—fully and completely, without even trying. Some kind of raised area on his own soft palate, yearning down as sharply as the rest of his mouth’s sensitive insides yearned up, straining to map its impossibly angled curves. His eyes skittered to the well’s rim, where he knew he would find its twin, if he only searched long enough.

“Uck ee,” he got out, consonants drowned away in a mixture of hot spit and cold sweat. “Oh it, uck
ee
.”

A small, sad nod. “The Terrible Eshphoriel,” Camberwell confirmed. “Who whispers in the empty places.”

Goss closed his mouth, then spat like he was trying to clear it, for all he knew that wouldn’t work. Then asked, hoarsely, stumbling slightly over the words he found increasingly difficult to form: “How mush . . . time I got?”

“Not much, probably.”

“’S what I fought.” He looked down, then back up at her, eyes sharpening. “How you geh those scars uh yers, Cammerwell?”

“Knowing’s not gonna help you, Goss.” But since he didn’t look away, she sighed, and replied. “Hunting accident. Okay?”

“Hmh, ’kay. Then . . . thing we need uh . . . new plan, mebbe. You ’gree?”

She nodded, twisting her lips; he could see her thinking, literally, cross-referencing what had to be a thousand scribbled notes from the margins of her mental grand grimoire. Time slowed to an excruciating crawl, within which Goss began to hear that still, small voice begin to mount up again, no doubt aware it no longer had to be particularly subtle about things anymore:
Eshphoriel Maskim, sometimes called Utukku, Angel of Whispers . . . and yes, I can hear you, little fleshbag, as you hear me; feel you, in all your incipient flowering and decay, your time-anchored freedom. We are all the same in this way, and yes, we mostly hate you for it, which only makes your pain all the sweeter, in context—though not quite so much, at this point, as we imitation-of-passionately strive to hate each other.

You guys stand outside space and time, though, right?
he longed to demand, as he felt the constant background chatter of what he’d always thought of as “him” start to dim.
Laid the foundations of the Earth—you’re megaton bombs, and we’re like . . . viruses. So why the hell would you want to be
anything
like us? To lower yourselves that way?

A small pause came in this last idea’s wake, not quite present, yet too much there to be absent, somehow: a breath, perhaps, or the concept of one, drawn from the non-throat of something far infinitely larger. The feather’s shadow, floating above the Word of God.

It does make you wonder, does it not?
the small voice “said.”
I know I do, and have, since before your first cells split.

Because they want to defile the creation they set in place, yet have no real part in
, Goss’s mind—
his
mind, yes, he was
almost
sure—chimed in.
Because they long to insert themselves where they have no cause to be and let it shiver apart all around them, to run counter to everything, a curse on Heaven. To make themselves the worm in the cosmic apple, rotting everything they touch
 . . .

The breath returned, drawn harder this time in a semi-insulted way, a universal “tch!” But at the same time, something else presented itself—just as likely, or un-. Valid as anything else, in a world touched by the Seven.

That’s all.

“I have an idea,” Camberwell said, at last, from somewhere nearby. And Goss opened his mouth to answer only to hear the angel’s still, small voice issue from between his teeth, replying, mildly—

“Do you, huntress? Then please, say on.”

This, then, was how they all finally came to be arrayed ’round the well’s rim, the seven of them who were left, standing—or propped up/lying, in Hynde and Katz’s cases—in front of those awful wall-orifices, staring into the multifaceted mosaic-eyes of God’s former
Flip My Universe
crew. ’Lij stood at the empty southeastern point, looking nervous, for which neither Goss nor the creature inhabiting his brain-pan could possibly blame him. While Camberwell busied herself moving from person to person, sketching quick and dirty version of the sigils on them with the point of a flick-knife she’d produced from one of her boots. Lao opened her mouth like she was gonna start crying even harder when she first saw it, but Camberwell just shot her the fearsomest glare yet—Medusa-grade, for sure—and watched her shut the fuck up, with a hitchy little gasp.

“This will bring us together sooner rather than later, you must realize,”
Eshphoriel told Camberwell, who nodded. Replying: “That’s the idea.”

“Ah. That seems somewhat . . . antithetical, knowing our works, as you claim to.”

“Maybe so. But you tell me—what’s better? Stay down here in the dark waiting for the air to run out only to have you celestial tapeworms soul-rape us all at last minute anyways, when we’re too weak to put up a fight? Or force an end now, while we’re all semi-fresh, and see what happens?”