A Maze of Glass, Chapter Ten, Pt. 3
The morning after the attack, they arrayed their notes.
Zoe’s:
adrift / a / drift / a / rift
doesn’t this world feel flat to you?
it is (every story)
the eyes are not there — yet —
peel back the lids, hold the head steady, we’ll show them
(the same ending)
rift / Breach / rip / tear / Veil / I’ve heard the whispers / eater of the
Pandora’s box forever
Sung-ho’s [marked where translated]:
[from Hangeul] waiting around the city
digital triggering fuses someone shouting “fire” in crowded
[in English] abattoir-terroirs here is a fallow
(story)
you’ll smell it first you smell it first you smelled it ffff
a torch handing down in the long-term
[from Hangeul] legacy is struggle
[in English] when you smell it pause.
…and Omar’s:
the plan is a higher power than the mind that made it.
Beyond the single sentence written in Omar’s notepad, they found several sketches. All the drawings captured the same subject, a wide flat building surrounded by fields and perimetered in fence. Ink-scratch scribbled margin-to-margin with detail. A close-up on a section of fencing revealed chipped paint and rust, chains and a padlock.
At one o’clock, in the kitchen, they splayed out the notes and Omar’s illustrations on the dining table and started pinning possible leads to a corkboard. The table bristled with print-outs. Lingering dreamer-vision flashes eddied around the periphery of Zoe’s thoughts.
She’d told Sung-ho last night that she believed the Summoner wanted to create a Breach. They weren’t sure if he even could. Creating a legitimate Breach in reality required very powerful, very violent, and very vulgar magic. So a ‘Breach’ scenario seemed unlikely. But then what was the Summoner doing?
Regardless of their enemy’s grand scheme, Zoe felt certain about one detail in particular.
The Summoner wanted a lot of people to witness a lot of supernatural phenomena very quickly.
But why?
Sung-ho stared at Omar’s sketches. Throughout the morning, he’d flitted between his various tasks and research and Omar’s sketches. Zoe watched him stare. Pursing his lips, Sung-ho stuffed his hands in his pockets.
“You know the place?” Zoe asked.
“I think so. Have to ask Seo-yeon.”
“Why?”
“Long story. Or not long, but boring.”
“I’ll wait ‘till it gets exciting then,” Zoe replied.
Just after two o’clock, Seo-yeon stopped home, delivering food from her restaurant. Before she’d even set the take-out bags on the counter, Sung-ho had called out, “Yeobo?” and the two had engaged in a short, muttering conversation in Korean. Zoe understood some of it, mentions of ‘buying meat,’ ‘years ago,’ ‘closed.’ Like most students, she found native speakers more or less unintelligible.
At the end of their conversation, Sung-ho and Seo-yeon stared at each other, glass-gazed.
Sung-ho cleared his throat. “I know where that building is.”
“It’s an old slaughterhouse,” Seo-yeon continued. “It belonged to the Ashers when we first moved here.”
But the Ashers were all dead. Every single Asher in the whole bloodline.
“It closed down seven or eight years ago. Never reopened.”
Zoe peered over at Omar, who had moved slowly-languidly throughout the day and spoken very little. Dazedly, he peered back. Since awakening from his vision, he’d engaged in only four or five lines of dialog, all of it basic silence-killing chit-chat. In the bottomless pools of his eyes, veins of new trauma pulsed. Maybe he’d seen or done something in the visions that disturbed him or maybe he’d become someone or something he couldn’t shake off again—a person’s first dreamer-visions trended toward rockiness. Luckily, dreamer-vision memories seldom survived very long, aberrant to the environment of a living human consciousness.
“He’s there,” Omar confirmed.
“His hobo’s hideaway,” Sung-ho said.
Seo-yeon straightened up and took a deep breath. “You’ll have to excuse me.”
Before she could leave, Sung-ho grabbed Seo-yeon, spun her into his body, and gave her a single prolonged kiss stretched across too many seconds not to become awkward. Zoe shifted her weight against a column framing the threshold between eat-in kitchen and formal dining room. She waited. Once the elongate embrace reached the point that even Omar started staring, Sung-ho released his wife.
“Uh…excuse me,” Seo-yeon repeated afterward, much more quietly.
After she left, Sung-ho turned back to Zoe. “Trap?”
“Seems like,” Zoe replied.
“How?” Omar asked, voice toneless with shellshock. “We learned it all from the visions.”
“Nobody knows how dreamer works,” Zoe said, the words feeling somehow too-too-familiar spilling off of her tongue. “Or what, exactly, it does to us. Or if it has agenda. Why does it show us what it shows us? Why does it take us where it does? Why give us these visions, these phrases, this building?”
“We asked for it,” Omar answered.
“The Summoner’s there,” Zoe put a finger on one of the sketches. “A place with probably a dozen mass-graves full of animal carcasses, enough scrap and junk and leftover tools to build a score of Constructs. Are we supposed to attack it? Do we think it’s undefended?”
Omar opened his mouth. Closed it.
“There is someone who knows a lot about this sort of thing,” Sung-ho walked over to the kitchen island and started unpacking the food. “If we’re willing to cross enemy lines.”
“Enemy lines?” Omar asked.
“It’s an idiom,” Sung-ho answered. “Zo’?”
Zoe frowned at the collection of their notes, the growing pile of research, the sketches so easily given location. She brushed a hand through her honey-brown hair, ruffling. “I’ll make the call. Where’s the nearest payphone?”
###############
The payphone closest to Sung-ho’s house required a fifteen minute drive out of the proper suburbs and into the more densely crowded pseudo-suburbia immediately surrounding the city proper. Zoe parked a few blocks away, giving her a ten minute walk. The walk required thirty minutes of recon, a series of perspectives and views offered by cafe windows and a brand new Barnes&Noble recently-opened, followed by a series of double-backs, her eyes roving the sidewalks and roadways constantly as she moved.
But by five o’clock, she’d shouldered her way into the glass booth and plucked the handset from the receiver. She’d pushed the coins into the battered slot and dialed the smudged digits. She held the handset to her ear and twined the steel cord between her fingers with her other hand.
In the southeastern distance, a choir of sirens crescendo’d their warbles. An unknown number of unknown emergency vehicles rushed toward an unknown destination—somewhere distantly southeast of the payphone.
Near the docks and the harbor, perhaps.
Zoe bent over, searching for a southeastern sightline. But whatever had happened, it had happened too far away to see. Even the short two- and three-story buildings clustered around the inner ring pseudo-suburbs of Oceanrest blocked enough of the horizon to prevent any kind of visual assessment. Sirens wailed, rushing for the harbor. Zoe twisted the payphone cord between her fingers. A trill pitched over the line.
“Hello?” Jill asked.
“It’s me.”
“Is something happening?”
Jill had defected from Malleus to Winters-Armitage not long ago. The Board had sought some kind of punishment, some hex or major curse laid on Jill to dissuade further defection. Cooler heads prevailed, in no small part due to the interventions of Sung-ho Park and Leonid Singh. It cost the very last dregs of the Briar name, the leftover scraps of a dying dynasty. Whatever damage their father had done, Jill did the rest.
“Sort of…nothing to do with you, don’t worry.”
“What is it?”
Still craned over to peer at the sky through the glass, Zoe watched a news helicopter chop the air southeastward. “I’m not sure. Well. I can tell you more in person. There might be something big happening.”
“Where are you calling from?” Jill asked.
“Somewhere very close to you.”
“Oh my god…are you here?”
“Yes. I caught a case and it got…complicated. It’ll take too long to get a specialist from our team up here to look at this and we don’t have that kind of time.”
“What’s going on?”
“I can’t cover it on the phone. You remember where we all met the night before your extraction? We’ll be there.”
“Who is ‘we?’” Jill pressed.
“Nobody you can’t trust.”
A pause.
“I’ll be there tonight,” Jill said.
“Thanks. I—I love you.”
“I love you, too, Zo’. So much.”
Zoe put the handset back on the hook and stepped out of the booth. Even with invocation-enhanced hearing, the sirens barely registered with her anymore. Muffled miles away, their wails came to her as whispers. They’d rushed in the direction of the harbor, that semi-abandoned and utterly downtrod swath of industrial and once-industrial bleakness. She considered walking the not-quite-three miles to the scene to check it out, but instead decided to return to the newest rental car and drive it back to Sung-ho’s.
On the radio, a local news reporter spoke with simultaneous urgency and calm, enunciated flatness. A homemade bomb had just exploded in an abandoned factory on the edges of the harbor and old industrial district. The explosion set part of the condemned structure ablaze and the fire department responded as quickly as possible. Firefolk had already pulled a couple indigents from the structure, but the building had since become dangerously unstable.
Zoe’s sixth sense hummed. She felt strangely out-of-body. Harnessed properly, she could make use of this sensation—but the sensation itself made it difficult to harness anything at all. Her consciousness sat behind her and inside her at the same time and beyond her control. Staring off to the southeast, Zoe felt a strange, subsonic pressure build against her eardrums.
She blinked. Back in her body, she turned the keys in the ignition.
Somehow, she knew, the bombing linked back to the Summoner. But how?
And, again, always, why?
Turn Back
...coming soon...
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