Veek chased him to the foot of the stairs. “Hey,” she called out. “What the hell’s your problem?”
He stopped on the landing. “I just think...” He shook his head. “We shouldn’t be messing with this anymore. Whatever it is, it’s way beyond us.”
“That’s why we’re looking,” she said. “To find out, remember? To learn what the hell this stuff is.”
“Maybe it’s better not knowing,” he snapped. “Maybe this is one of those...one of those things men weren’t meant to know.”
She frowned up at him through her glasses. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened, I just think—”
“Nate,” she said, “you’re freaking out. What just happened?”
He shook his head.
“You’ve been through an earthquake before, right? It’s sort of scary but they almost never amount to anything. Once I slept through one that—”
“It wasn’t an earthquake.”
She studied his face. “Why do you keep saying that?”
Nate pressed his palms against his temples and shook his head. “This is nuts,” he said. “It’s just...it’s fucking nuts.”
“What?”
He looked at her. “When he flipped the switch and the ground started shaking,” he said, “you saw the sun go away?”
She nodded.
“It wasn’t clouds,” he said. “It was going out.”
Veek blinked. She opened her mouth, shut it, then blinked again. “What?”
“Right in front of my eyes,” said Nate. “It turned red, the whole sky got dark around it, and the sun started to go out.”
Nate went into the office determined to get as caught up as possible. He’d been neglecting his work for too long, as the stack of mail crates proved. A fourth one showed up first thing that morning. It was mostly issues of the magazine, so it would go fast. For the moment, though, it just added to his pile. A pile now higher than his desktop.
Halfway through the magazine crate Eddie showed up. The big man made a few clucking noises and shook his head while he made some comments about productivity. Nate tried to ignore him and kept typing in addresses.
When Zack and Jimmy filed out for a quick smoke-break, Nate switched to his browser. He checked email and saw he’d gotten a response from someone at the city’s Office of Public Works about the building. It’d almost been a month since he put in a request to see the Kavach Building’s blueprints. He’d given up on it. Now he was nervous about what it might say.
He looked at the news. There was no mention of anything happening to the sun. No unexpected eclipses or sudden dense cloud layers. One weather forecast said the spectacular weekend sunshine was going to last all week. There were no reports of an earthquake in Los Angeles. Not even a small one.
As far as Nate could tell, whatever happened yesterday only happened inside Kavach.
Which was insane. Grade-A insane, without a doubt.
But it hadn’t been his imagination. The building had shook. He’d heard Tim talking with Mandy about it in the hall—with Biblical commentary from Andrew—after he’d retreated to his apartment. They’d all felt it. So had Mrs. Knight. He wondered if she was going to complain to Oskar about the disturbance.
Oskar
, Nate thought.
Maybe we should’ve been listening to him all along.
The machine in the building, the machine that
was
the building, had made the sun go dim. It made the sun change color and fade in intensity, like a candle wick sputtering in a puddle of wax. But only for people in the building.
Maybe,
he thought
, it did something to the windows. Like polarizing lenses. Maybe the glass got dark and it made the sun look like it was fading.
Except there had been the little girl in the next building. The girl with the bright blue plastic cup. She hadn’t been dark. He’d expected her to look up at the thing in the sky and scream or cry or react somehow. But she hadn’t seen it.
I saw it.
And that, he admitted, was the real problem. He’d lied to Veek. He hadn’t told her everything, because what he
had
seen up in the sky was real madness.
The sun had waned, the sky had turned red and he’d caught a glimpse of...something else. It hadn’t been just a red sun freaking him out. There’d been something moving up there, something fading
in
even as the sun was fading out. Something bigger than any plane he’d ever seen, even the ones that sometimes roared by just overhead and blotted out the sky. It had been that big and it had been far away, like a blue whale soaring in the sky.
A whale with bat-wings and a huge mass of...
It had to be a delusion of some kind. Maybe it had been a balloon. He was so out of touch, it wouldn’t be hard to believe some custom blimp was flying around LA and he hadn’t heard about it. Probably advertising some new tentpole movie. It could’ve just been a picture on the side of a blimp. He glanced around his desk for a current issue of the magazine and wondered if there were any summer movies with big dragons or space monsters that had
tentacles.
That had been the snapping point. Seeing the dozens of tentacles drifting back and forth, moving up and down in the air—and they
had
moved. It hadn’t been a picture on a blimp. A blimp that vanished as soon as Roger threw the switch back.
A hand settled on his shoulder and he shuddered away from it.
“Dude,” said Zack. “Chill. It’s just me.”
“Sorry,” said Nate. “Off in my own world. What’s up?”
Zack sighed. “I quit.”
Nate sat up in his chair. “Sorry?”
“I’m done. Packing up. I just sent Eddie an email.”
“You’ve got something else lined up?”
Zack leaned against the desk and shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “I just can’t take this anymore, y’know?”
“I guess.”
“It’s a mind-numbing job with shit pay and no bennies,” he said. “I think I’m losing an IQ point every week. I checked it out—if I’d been working for Jack in the Box all this time I’d’ve made another two thousand dollars and I’d have a health plan.”
Nate had no response. He’d started working at the magazine six months before Zack.
“Jack in the Box, man! That’s a better career path than this place.” He shook his head again. “I want to do something with my life, y’know? Achieve something. I can’t sit here doing data entry for another year and wishing something amazing would happen.”
“Yeah,” said Nate, “I know what you mean.”
* * *
Nate paced in his apartment for an hour. Veek was going to be pissed at him. Pissed was her default setting, so he couldn’t imagine dodging it. He needed to apologize and he needed to tell her about the
tentacles
thing he’d seen up in the sky. Bugs terrified her. She had to understand him getting freaked out by something with wings that dwarfed football fields.
Then Veek banged on his door. He realized he’d been pacing around without a shirt on and grabbed a nearby tee. Then he sniffed it, threw it toward the bathroom, and grabbed a clean one off the shelf. She banged again. “Hold on,” he yelled.
He glanced through the peephole and saw Veek had turned into Roger. He unchained the door. “What’s up?” asked Nate. “I thought you always worked late.”
Roger shook his head. “Told the best boy I was sick. Started coughing and sniffling at lunch. He let me go on the Abby.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Means he let me go early,” said Roger. “Know you’re having some issues right now, bro, but this is seriously fucked up.”
Nate nodded. “I’m working past them.”
“Good.” Roger held up a sheet of paper. “She translated the mystery note from your wall. Said it’s really authentic and creepy.”
“What?”
“She thought I was writing a script or something.”
Nate took the sheet. It was covered in the neat, curvy handwriting so many women mastered and men almost never did. The top half was the message, recopied in the same Cyrillic that it had been on the wall. Below it was the translation in English.
To Whomever Finds These Words,
Thirteen years ago I made a discovery of the most shocking nature. Some men would quake at the nightmarish truth I learned. Others would lose their minds to the horror of it. Indeed, I have since learned, much to my dismay, of those who accept and embrace such horror, as a drowning man will sometimes embrace another and take the poor unfortunate down with him. In the face of such a destiny, perhaps such madness is to be expected.
Yet I have chosen to resist, and I have been fortunate enough to find those men brave enough and strong enough to resist with me, and I am proud to call them my friends.
Humanity shall never lay down and die. Humanity shall conquer every challenge it is given. Kavach is a monument to what we have achieved, and to the inextinguishable spark that is man.
Do not falter. Do not doubt. Keep the needles at zero.
Your Friend in Triumph,
Aleksander Koturovic
12 August 1895
He looked up and met Roger’s gaze.
“What the fuck, right?” said Roger.
“Aleksander Koturovic,” said Nate. “That’s the name on the machine. It’s a person.”
“Yeah, saw that, too.”
“What language is it?”
“Serbian, but she said it’s old Serbian. A lot of people just use the regular English alphabet now, not the Russian one.”
“Latin and Cyrillic.”
“Yeah, whatever. See what it says, though?”
“What do you mean?”
“‘
Keep the needles at zero,’” said Roger. “What d’you think that means? We just found a whole bunch of hidden dials and gauges and stuff.”
Nate nodded. “All of them at zero.”
“And everything went apeshit when I flipped a switch and made ‘em move, remember?”
“Yeah,” said Nate, “I remember.”
“Been thinking about this all day,” he said. “You get what’s going on here?”
Nate tried to wrap his mind around the message and the machine. “We need to make sure the needles stay at zero.”
Roger shook his head. “Think big,” he said. “Machine’s on and things are cool, right? Everything’s cool while the needles are at zero.”
“Okay,” said Nate. “Right.”
“That means all the shit that happened when I fucked with it—when the needles weren’t at zero—that’s what things are like when the machine’s not working. That’s what the machine’s
stopping
things from being like.”
Roger tapped the piece of paper and it rustled between Nate’s fingers.
“That’s
normal
,” said Roger.
“Okay,” said Nate, “despite my little freak-out last weekend, we’ve learned a lot this week. I’m going to tell you my one new bit, and then I’m going to let Debbie tell you all the stuff she found.”
They were gathered in the lounge for the Saturday meeting. It was a smaller group. Clive was working at a theater in North Hollywood, but he’d heard most of it already, and Andrew was at a prayer meeting. Mandy didn’t want anything to do with them after the building shook. Tim had gotten her to promise she wouldn’t turn them in to Oskar.
They’d dragged the couches into a rough circle.
More of a triangle, really
, thought Nate. He leaned on the arm of one couch, where Veek sat with Debbie and Tim. She was next to Nate, but still a bit cool toward him. Mrs. Knight dominated her couch, her cane ready to strike. Roger and Xela sprawled together on another couch, and her laptop covered her lap.
“I finally heard back from Public Works the other day,” Nate said. “They’re supposed to have all the building plans on file. The only things they don’t keep are residences, which get tossed, and historical documents. Those go off to libraries or museums.
“The guy was pretty helpful. A bunch of stuff from the late 1800s had all been moved to the Getty a while back, and he’d assumed the Kavach plans, if they still existed, would’ve gone with it.”
“And now they’re missing from the Getty?” guessed Mrs. Knight.
He shook his head. “No, they never went. He checked and it turns out the Kavach plans are still considered active material and are still on file at Public Works.”
“Fantastic,” said Xela. “So we can go see them.”