woozy from the stench below the smell of roses, so I also didn’t feel like moving, but there was something different about Johnny’s stillness—as if she had been pressed to the bench. Tendons stood out along her neck.
“Just to clarify,” I said into the silence, flinching as Helen and Tariq turned to me. “You’re from that... that group that used to... worship Them. The Ssarati. Aren’t you?”
“Is that what she told you?” Helen said stiffly. “We are nothing of the sort.”
“Oh, the stories I could tell you,” Tariq said, smiling and tapping his feet on the floor. “A girl, a hundred years ago, from my father’s tribe, no older than you, who led them into the true way of the Ssarati... lured from our people by a white adventurer, so-called...”
“We do not have time for those stories, Tariq,” Helen said. “Thousands of years have passed under our supervision, young man. We once fought Their incursions; now, we cloud Their curiosity and hand down the old ways. We guard the gates, monitor various indicators, keep the wards and sigils fresh, discourage tourists and adventure-seekers, strengthen the spells where we can, preserve the old scrolls and tomes, copy and disseminate. We are a society of knowledge and wayfinding. We are scholars and guardians.”
I had run out of nerves, and could only nod as they lost interest and turned back to Johnny. Tariq’s gaze remained on me, though: amused, even delighted.
“But we did use a cloaking spell to get you out of that police station,” Helen said sharply, “and if what you are saying is true, we will attract more attention than is our due.”
“What do you want, an apology?” Johnny snapped.
“We want merely to know what you know, so that we may decide what to do next,” Tariq said, soothingly.
“That’s not what you want at all,” Johnny said. “No matter what I say, you won’t pick a side.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We are on the side of the preservation of humanity, as are you. You are no… lone light in the darkness, Joanna.”
“You’re not on our side.”
Tariq said, with a note of pleading, “We have asked you to join us many times, we have asked for use of your facilities and the academics who work for you; we have never asked you to use your great intelligence for us directly. Why have you always refused? Why do you even deny an association with us?”
Johnny stared mutely at them.
But I knew the answer she could not give them: that if they were allowed to close the distance between them, they would know what she really was, and how she had become so.
They would know she owed everything to something they had spent all their lives fighting.
The air seemed to darken; hidden in its nest of pillows, the white cat bared its teeth. Something screamed at the back of my neck, not merely itching but burning, the half-healed welts on my cheek where Drozanoth had touched me beginning to burn too. I got up slowly, aware that Tariq and Helen were staring at me, and slung my bag over my head. “Come on, Johnny,” I said, hearing my own voice thin and brassy. “We have to go.”
“Check,” she whispered, but still didn’t move. Tariq got up, though, and crossed the room to me, hands out.
“Nicholas, sit down, let us talk like adults,” he said.
I retched from the smell as he approached, and backed away, getting between him and Johnny. “Don’t,” I said. “Let us go.”
“No one is keeping you here,” Helen said icily. “Go, then, if you believe your own tale.” I looked up at her, and back down just in time to see Tariq reaching for my chest; casually, not fast.
I got a hand up and found the silver pendant half-hidden in his robe, seized it—a blinding burst of pain, as if I’d grabbed a wasp and had the sting driven into my palm—and yanked, snapping it from the thin chain and dropping it on the floor, then kicking it under the bench. Tariq’s hands stopped moving; I looked into his baffled eyes, the confusion slowly turning to anger. Under the bench, something was screaming, a tiny noise, that too like a wasp.
“Your name is known to Them,” he snarled, unmoving. “Yours, boy. It hangs about you like a cloud. In Their books, hidden in a dark place, in an obscene script, it is written that your time will end in sorrow. Leave her, before it is too late. Stop paying her price.”