few unbroken bulbs, like an ancient ruin lit up for tourists at night. I wondered if anything had survived in some tiny pocket of water caught in the craggy faux-stone. It didn’t seem impossible.
What did seem impossible was getting this debris, which I belatedly realized we had piled right over top of Ben, out of the room. We both leaned on our brooms and looked at it. Some of the pieces of plexiglass had been too big and thick to shift, but the rest looked like a sinister iceberg, where tropical fish sent their elderly to die. Water dripped ceaselessly from it. It would be a long, long time before this room was completely dry.
“How are we going to get all this out of here?” I finally said, my voice broken and too loud in the quiet.
“Rutger and I can do it with one of the mini-lifts,” she said. In contrast, her voice sounded startlingly level. I wondered if she was in shock.
“Johnny. I... I’m sorry about Ben.”
“Me too. He was a good octopus.” Tears started down her face now, slow and undramatic. Her shins were dyed black from his ink. “This is all my fault.”
“Don’t say that. You couldn’t have said yes.” I swallowed, reached out, pulled my hand back. She tugged her shirt up and dried her face with the hem. “You couldn’t have. It said...”
“It said They want it, not that They don’t want us to have it,” she said, and laughed, a slightly hysterical caw. “I think I know what They want it for. They think they can weaponize it. I bet that’s what they think. All that power... like the old Y’g D’bzan’ithot Ul-Nbdar. The strangest weapon that’s ever existed. A doomsday device. Like the one that destroyed Ur.”
“What?”
“It’s in some of the carvings in the cities the survivors fled to,” she said. “And it’s the same one pictured in Macchu Pichu, and Mohenjo Daro.”
“But the—”
“You should go home.”
I stared at her, mouth hanging open as all my gears clashed. “Go... home? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Why would I be kidding? You want to stay and deal with, with...?” She waved her arm around the room, then flinched as if she’d just noticed she was hurt, without looking down.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do. And I don’t want to leave you. Not like this. Jesus, Johnny, it... it just... it...”
“I know.”
“Do you know that that’s the thing you say the most goddamn often out of anything and it is driving me insane?”
“Well I can’t help it if I know things!”
“You think what you know is always right! Except now! Now you just think you’re right! But you’re wrong!”
“How do you know I’m wrong? Are you going to take that thing’s word over mine?”
“It’s not a matter of words! It’s that it killed Ben! Right in front of us! Right in front of us! And now you’re telling me to just leave, like you can handle this alone, because you want to handle everything alone! Well look what’s happened now that you’re trying to do it alone this time!”
“I told you, I can get this under control! You don’t know the entire story!”
“I would if you would just fucking tell me! We used to tell each other everything!”
She caught her breath, and leaned her broom against the waterlogged armchair that had borne the brunt of the water, now pushed almost to the opposite wall. Her face looked slack somehow, dark, all the light gone from it. Hours seemed to pass before she looked up and spoke, just when I was about to apologize for yelling at her.
“All right. I’ll tell you. I should have told you years ago,” she said quietly.
It felt as if a wave of hot air washed over me, head to toe, physically staggering me. Nothing good had ever come from someone saying that, I thought. In the history of mankind, there was no more ominous sentence. I braced in the silence, listening to water drip from a broken pipe in the ceiling.
“It was better for us both if you didn’t know,” she said. “But I can’t protect you any more. Or so it seems.”
I felt myself bracing for impact, as if she might slap me. My stomach churned and gurgled, always my first and most reliable barometer of something going wrong.
“Drozanoth knows me because it was the one who... made me what I am.”
“Made you... what... what? What did it make you?”
“A prodigy. A genius. Smarter than the average bear. Whatever you want