“I asked you a simple question. Do you like me? Yes or no, you could have said either.”
I choked down my pride. “I’m used to keeping people at arm’s length. It’s safer that way.” I looked up, waiting until his eyes met mine. “Yes. The answer was—is—yes.”
Brynner looked like I’d sucker-punched him, his eyes completely blank. Then he slowly grinned wide enough to make a crocodile nervous. “I promised Rory I’d help him with a tractor as soon as you were better, but I’ll be back tomorrow.” Brynner looked like he’d swallowed a helium balloon, as he bounced out of his chair. “I’ll see you later, Grace.” Still smiling, he left me there.
The hours stretched out after five o’clock, becoming one long gel of nameless voices on the intercom mixed with the constant shuffle of feet outside. I lost myself in Heinrich Carson’s journals. The man saw demons everywhere, monsters, and magic. In an earlier age, he would have been a great shaman. A mighty king.
I finished the last of the early journals and hit a block of symbols whose pattern was familiar, but whose meaning I couldn’t decipher. Based on the time, it had to have been from the year of the accident that killed Lara Carson.
I’d looked it up, trying to fill in details, but the BSI records I found contained nothing about the accident. She didn’t even have a corpse number or cremation record on file, which, given her status in the BSI, wouldn’t have been tolerated. We didn’t allow our own to come back. Now that I’d seen the intelligence of the Re-Animus, I knew why.
The corpse of every BSI operative and analyst held secrets about what we knew, and what we didn’t. So when I died, they’d burn me to ashes and scatter those. There were worse ways to go. Which made me curious. Heinrich Carson had a corpse number recorded, but no record of cremation. Why?
What I needed was to understand what Heinrich wrote about. What he felt, and thought. Stymied by the foreign concepts, I switched to the writing Brynner gave me. The longer he was gone, the guiltier I felt about sending him home. I’d begged him to do something for me, kicked him out of the room after he stayed with me, and didn’t even say thanks properly.
Problem was, there’s no appropriate level of thanks for “saving my life, waiting with me, and acting as my errand boy.” I wouldn’t find a greeting card in any store for that situation.
The outer ring of symbols on the picture I recognized as standard text from The Book of the Dead, just like the one I’d been summoned to Seattle for. “Open the way, show the way, the secret way,” and so on. The inner ring, on the other hand, defied easy translation. “The eastern Nile delta,” read one section. “The west desert edge,” read another.
Down from? Up to? The paths of Osiris. If I reversed the order from the outside ring, it made a legal sentence. “From the eastern Nile Delta, down the paths of Osiris, up the west desert edge.” That didn’t make sense, either. In Seattle, I’d had so little time to study the spell all I could come up with was a best guess. Now I had hours to do what I loved.
The problem was, the center symbols didn’t form any concept at all, just a name. Ra-Ame.
If Brynner were here, he’d read the phrases as symbolic and run with it. The paths of the dead would be mystic portals, and the other two . . . New Orleans. An “eastern nile,” Benton could certainly be a western desert edge.
I’d been at this too long, but couldn’t sleep.
An e-mail notification popped up, and I tabbed over to it, but it wasn’t for me.
Brynner had left me logged in to the BSI network, with his account, his access.
Nineteen
GRACE
Using Brynner’s BSI access code violated at least a dozen BSI statutes and every rule of decency, but I wanted more than anything to understand. What happened to him that day his mother died? What exactly did she do?
It had to haunt him, and I knew better than most about painful memories. My brother hadn’t exactly wanted to hug and console me after our parents died. I think he saw too much of my dad in himself and wondered if their accident was really an accident, or if Dad had followed through on his many