I was outside in a desert, on a night with no moon (but there had been a moon last night) and only the faintest of stars (when they had shone so brightly that I saw constellations I should never have seen).
The sand began to hiss, then boom and roar, as if something heavy were driving over it. I stood poised on my tiptoes as my eyes began to adjust to the starlight. A whirlpool formed in the sand, grew, hungrily ate its own crumbling edges. Sinkhole!
I turned to run, slid backwards. Yelling, pumping my arms and kicking my knees almost up to my chin, I scrambled up the shifting slope and got back onto firmer ground, then watched in terror as the sand drained away my remaining footprints. There was something in its centre, something dark yet emitting its own dark light, like ultraviolet, something that my eyes couldn’t perceive but something else could, my skin or my inner ear or my pineal gland, something that made me turn away uneasily.
Finally I studied the thing through slitted fingers, feeling again that sense of disorientation or illness, like looking into a malfunctioning strobe light, barely lessened by the narrowness of field. And there it was. Had to be. The book.
It was the size of an ordinary paperback, emitting that pulsing throb of ugly light, its cover illegible but marked, clearly, with something. Swirls and circles, probably meant to be models of stars or planets moving, with a darker purpose that anyone casually looking at it wouldn’t know. But I recognized magic circles now.
It took several more long peeks to realize, with a little involuntary yelp, that it wasn’t sitting in the sand on its own. I wasn’t alone here in the desert. And I had spent so long feeling unwatched that it seemed to come as an extra shock to see someone there watching me just as I was watching hi... it. No gender seemed right.
It was curled in the sand, its limbs not human, more like paddles, webbed and cracked where the starlight touched them. Its face was a smooth slate of black stone, like an obsidian arrowhead. That was the only smooth surface—its hunched back was irregularly lumpy, as if it had both wings and legs under there, or—I shuddered—a whole other monster. Like Master Blaster in Mad Max, but dead and rotting, maybe forever.
It spoke to my entire body, every cell, every muscle, in a way I couldn’t even articulate properly as fear, more like a reflex—like shading your eyes against the sun. My entire body wanted to turn and run so badly that my thighs trembled with the effort of staying still. But we needed that book. We couldn’t do anything else without it. If I couldn’t get it, I may as well give up and allow the end of the world to happen.
I edged towards the pit, kicking at the sand to make a ramp. The light burned and throbbed as if it were physically trying to push me away. But I didn’t dare close my eyes as I walk-slid down the slope, shoes filling with the black sand, in case I overshot and collided with the dead thing holding it. Between the smell and the light I found myself retching emptily again and again. Everything about the thing and the book seemed to want me gone. But knowing that was half its power. I wondered what would happen to someone if they simply wandered in here and didn’t know what the book was, not that Akhmetov would ever let that happen.
It was flatter at the bottom of the pit, where the thing holding the book sat and rotted half-buried in the dry sand. I held my breath, reached for it—then paused. She’d said not to touch it. They’d both said not to touch it. But what choice did I have, if she couldn’t find me here?
I unwound the scarf from my head and wrapped my hands in it, making a sling, and reached out again.
“Who are you?” whispered the dead thing.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I SCREAMED AND leapt backwards, my head crashing onto the sand. Above me, the stars in the flat, charcoal-gray sky grew marginally darker. I scrambled up, groping for the dropped scarf and clutching it to me for what scanty comfort and protection it could give, like holding up a blanket against a nuclear bomb.
“I’m...” I hesitated. Tricksy things, she’d said, the Ancient Ones. They’d studied humans for a long time and knew that words