conditions.”
“Wow.”
“So, for example, once upon a time, the universe was set up so that iron could defeat any magic. If you drove an iron knife, even a nail, into a magic circle, that would be the end of the spell—and, sometimes, the end of the person casting the spell. No one knows who created that condition, but it was unbreakable; it was simply the way the world worked, like gravity. And then a very, very powerful wizard in about 1100—some scholars think it might even have been Morgan le Fay, King Arthur’s sister—did manage to break it. Some say she got hold of secret scrolls looted from the Holy Land during the Crusades. Anyway, the universe changed, and iron lost its power. Now you could drive a steel I-beam into a magic circle and it would crumple like tinfoil before the spell failed.”
“So what we’re trying to do,” I said slowly, “is... create a universe... where the gates are closed and They’re gone?”
“To be honest, I think that’s why we got a head start,” she said. “Because They didn’t think we could. At least for a little while it wouldn’t have occurred to Drozanoth at all.”
“But the universe that’s currently set up has your covenant in it,” I said. “Could you change that?”
“I can’t break that. Only They could. All I can do is work with the parameters of the spell I’m doing.”
“Shit.” I chewed on that for a while, rubbing my back, which had begun to ache against the sack from lack of support. “Listen, I hate to say it, but what if we... what if we can’t? Or we’re too late? Or the cost is too high for us to pay? I mean, I know you’re thinking about all the things that could go wrong. What’s our backup plan?”
“What do you think it should be?”
“Nuke ’em from orbit,” I said promptly. “It’s the only way to be sure.”
She laughed.
“No, seriously,” I said. “Is that a thing? Could we do that?”
“All joking aside, I could pull some strings to get a nuclear strike,” she said.
“No. Fuck off,” I said, forcing my jaw back up. “You can’t, though.”
“Yeah, I can. I’m in Bilderberg—”
“Which is what?”
“…Not important. Let’s say a group of mostly very nice people who aren’t necessarily seen running things. They asked me to join in 1994, and I’ve got some favours to call in, if I needed to. If.”
“Jesus Christ.” I pushed down an enormous wave of nausea and tried to think clearly. Thinking of her making a phone call and then that Ray Bradbury story, with the silhouettes burned on the walls. The photos from Japan in 1945. The one thing we had all agreed, worldwide, that we would never do again, no matter what. How in the hell did a seventeen year-old get into that position, prodigy or not? “But that would be a last-ditch effort.”
“Yeah. A nuke might not even have an effect on the Ancient Ones themselves. There’s a chance it could kill some of the smaller ones, what They call the Lesser Angels. But the old records, of course, can’t show what a modern weapon would do to them, because they weren’t invented yet.”
“But we know what it does to people.” I closed my eyes, picturing it: the mushroom clouds, people blurring, vanishing, like in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Sarah Connor’s hands vanishing from the fence. Some favour. “What else could we do?”
“How do you kill something magical? Something that could come from the sky, or from the ocean, or from right next to you? Something bigger than your field of vision can take in? Something that could destroy a whole city in minutes? That could drive people to riot and murder, that could control minds, get into dreams, poison the water and the air before we could instigate a plan B? I mean, assuming that a nuke can’t do it, let’s say.”
“I don’t know.”
“Me neither. Nukes are the best we’ve got, the best the human race has. To be honest, maybe weaponizing the reactor against Them would have worked. But that ran the risk of it falling into Their hands. Claws. Tentacles. Whatever. And that’s a risk I wouldn’t take. I’d kill myself first.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I’d kill myself first,” she repeated. “Believe it.”
We sat there for a few minutes, just listening to the words bounce around us. I wondered what power even saying something like that might have. Finally I said, “Hey, John?”
“Yeah?”
I pointed behind me. “Nut sack.”
“Nicholas.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
DESPITE THE JOLTING, the