"The shofar," Coby said. "Do you know where it is?"
"Of course." The man looked puzzled, as if Coby wasn't behaving quite the way he expected.
"I need you to bring me to the shofar," Coby said, trying for a gentler tone. "It's very important."
The man nodded. "Yes, we organised it the way you asked. There's been a high... price." He looked to his left, through a doorway that led to the canteen and the corpses on its floor. "But they - well, they're replaceable We've funnelled the intruders through the building. They're trapped - but they're near the shofar. It seemed... but those were your orders."
"I had my reasons," Coby said, unable to imagine what they were.
Morgan stood in the doorway to a small bedroom. The room was windowless, ensuring no threat behind him. He had line of sight to the cross-corridor ahead, and he'd cleared the way back of all hostiles.
It was a perfect defensive position, but moving forward meant exposing himself to fire from an unknown number of enemies. He could feel his heart racing and his blood surging. He'd long ago learnt to find a kind of pleasure in the risk. Soldiers like him were gamblers and it was the possibility of losing which made the game worth playing.
Which didn't mean he
wanted
to die. He held himself still, gun braced and aimed at the corner where his last assailant had disappeared with a yell of pain after Morgan winged him.
Nothing. Morgan let the seconds stretch into minutes, aware of how waiting could wear on a person during combat. The fearful anticipation of action would eventually turn into a gnawing compulsion to do something
right now
. Inexperienced fighters could often be lured out of secure positions by that impulse.
After ten minutes of waiting, his own patience had been exhausted. He eased out of the door, footsteps silent on the tile floor. He slowed and pressed his back to the wall as he neared the corner. Then he listened, extending all his senses like an animal. But he still heard nothing, not even the betraying whisper of breath.
He counted one heartbeat, then two - then leapt and rolled, bringing his gun to bear as he rose.
There was nobody. He could see blood, tacky drops drying on the ochre tiles. If the Croatoans truly meant to stop him, they'd have set up their own defensive position here. He should have been unable to move on without exposing himself to their fire. But they weren't here. They
wanted
him to follow - to lead him onward, as they had been since the moment he first crossed the fence.
"Fuck!" he said, already running back. He leapt over the corpses of the men he'd killed, pawns someone had sacrificed in a larger game. There was a door at the end of the corridor and he rammed his shoulder against it, sucking in a breath at the pain.
It held fast. He grunted, angry but not surprised, then stepped back to put a bullet through the lock. It shot through clean, but when he pressed against the door again, it failed to shift. A kick jarred his knee but achieved nothing. The way back had been barred.
He had no choice. He had to go the only way they'd left open for him: forward, into the jaws of the trap.
Alex followed a trail of corpses. Her gun trembled in her hand and a distant shot caused her finger to tighten reflexively on the trigger and put a bullet in the floor only inches from her foot. She yelped and holstered her weapon.
The spiderweb runes in the walls were all around her. If she stared at them too long, she began to feel their power drawing her in. This whole building was a trap designed for a spirit traveller, and she wondered why it had been built that way, when Hammond claimed she was the only spirit traveller in the country. Had the place been designed specifically for
her
? But it wasn't new, or not entirely - it had to be a few years old. Could someone really have been planning to draw her here for that long?
A shot rang out, somewhere behind her this time, and she heard a shout of rage that might have come from the big, bearded leader of the militia. They were all being herded towards the centre of the compound and whatever waited for them there. There was more gunfire, even nearer this time. A shock of adrenaline liquefied her guts and tensed her muscles, urging her to run. She gritted her teeth and fought it, focusing on the walls and the runes inside them, trying to understand what they meant.
When she looked more closely, she could see the pattern in them, loops and swirls repeated from floor to ceiling, but no two quite the same. She thought about a concert she'd been taken to by her father - some political function where he thought his chances of re-election would be improved by the presence of his pretty young daughter. The music had been by Bach, a tune that circled round and round but never quite returned to the beginning, always a little changed. She remembered feeling frustrated as she listened to it, silently willing the melody to complete - to finally
end
.
She pressed her hand against the wall but it remained unyielding. Understanding it wasn't enough; she needed a way to get past. To end it, she supposed. How had the Bach ended? She seemed to recall that eventually it
had
returned to the beginning, bringing a sense of completeness that had been oddly satisfying. But where did this place begin? She studied the endlessly repeating pattern and sighed. She didn't know.
Another volley of shots sounded behind her, and this time she obeyed her animal instincts and ran. She'd been running for a very long time, she realised. And the compound was large, but it wasn't
that
huge, was it? The pattern in the walls was twisting the space inside them, turning the corridors into the same endlessly repeating loop, like one of those Escher prints her second-grade math teacher had liked so much, stairs you could climb forever and never reach the top.
She tried to wrench herself out of it, to return to the finite building in the mundane world. It was useless. Something held her here, either the building's power or her own undisciplined abilities.
Her footsteps slapped against the tile, a hypnotic rhythm. She lost herself in it and only slowly realised there was now a syncopated beat. Other footsteps were approaching - but these people were in the real world. They were all around her now. She could hear the desperate rasping breath of men who were exhausted and very afraid.
She grasped hold of the sound and pulled herself towards it. For a moment she felt herself suspended, neither here nor there. There was a tearing sensation as something inside her ripped itself free, and she found herself exactly where she'd started, but no longer alone.
Jimmy cursed and turned his gun on her as all around him his men yelled in shock. She raised her hands. There was a killing rage in Jimmy's eyes and she waited for the bullet and the pain, but after a second he lowered the gun.
"Where..?" he said.
She smiled, though she knew it looked sickly. "I told you I can walk through walls."
His men muttered and he stared at her. "That's... some power, lady. The good Lord don't give gifts like that often."
She thought about Raven, but that wasn't the lord Jimmy was talking about. "Yeah, I know I've been blessed."
She'd emerged into the real world in a meeting room. The carpet was scuffed beneath a glass-topped table and the lights in the ceiling were the harsh neon kind that made everyone look unwell. Jimmy's men were pale and blood-spattered and there were far fewer than she knew he'd brought to the compound. One man clutched his arm against his chest, its wrist mangled and red. Another was supported between two of his fellows, his head nodding down towards his chest as his eyelids drooped.
"We've walked right into their trap," Jimmy said.
She nodded. "Do you think the shofar's even here?"
"Lahav said it was."
"He could be wrong."
His men didn't like that, but Jimmy took time to consider it as he scratched a finger through his beard. "He coulda been mistaken," he said eventually. "What he is lives inside a man, and no man's perfect. But close up he can
sense
it, and he sensed it here. That's why he couldn't come hisself - it's lethal to him."
"Then they must be using it to lure us in."
"Why? What do they want from us?"
"Not hard to figure, is it?" one of the other men muttered, a redhead with an acne-scarred face. "They want to kill us."
Jimmy shook his head. "I don't buy it, brother. We lost half the men they did and we're in their base. If they wanted rid of us, there musta been an easier way.
"But they wanted us
here
," Alex said, looking at the runes swirling through the walls around them. They wanted
me
here, she thought.
"Then here's the last place we wanna be," Jimmy said. "Think you can walk us through these walls, lady?"
His small blue eyes bored into hers, more intelligent than she'd given him credit for, and she could only shake her head. "I'm working on it."
"Work faster," he said as a sudden explosive shock shook the door on its hinges. One of the men grabbed Alex and they rolled together to the side of the room as the door exploded inward in a shower of wood-chips and shotgun pellets.
Alex let the same man lead her by the arm as they fought onward, deeper into the trap. She knew she'd be safer in the spirit world, where bullets couldn't touch her. But she remembered the endless spiral and thought about walking it eternally and kept herself in the mundane world, where the worst that could happen to her was death.
There were fewer Croatoans to face them now. Alex looked down at their young faces as she walked over their corpses and wondered that they'd been happy to sacrifice themselves just to bait a trap. They hardly needed to die anymore; she and her allies could only go forward. But they kept on fighting, as if they didn't realise that they'd served their purpose.
A bullet tore past her ear, clipping the lower lobe. The blood dripped to the floor and the wound stung and then throbbed. Another room, another gunfight, and now Morgan was with them. He quivered with tension, his face hardened by the blood smeared across his cheek and brow. She saw other splatters of blood on his T-shirt and soaking one leg of his jeans, but from the easy way he moved she guessed that none of it was his.
And then the seemingly endless corridor ended and there were no more young men and women to throw their lives away against the militia's guns. There was just one person in the room: a curly-haired man. Though she'd never seen his face, she knew that he was the same figure who'd haunted her for seven years - the aura of danger he carried was unmistakable. His spirit self didn't surprise her, a grinning fox with blood around its muzzle, but his human face was more ordinary than she'd expected, the only unusual thing about him the pale hazel of his eyes.
He looked at them in shock, as if bringing them here hadn't been part of his plan. But in his hand he was holding a curling ram's horn with a gilded tip.
"Coby," Morgan said. "You work fast."
"I had friends."
"So do I - and they're here and armed. Give me the shofar."
"Or I could just use it," Coby said. "Drive all your spirits from all your bodies. Leave you empty."
"I already am," Morgan said. "The shofar doesn't work against me, so hand it over before someone gets trigger happy. I don't need to kill you, but I really don't have a big problem with it."
Coby's eyes flickered around the room, but there was no help for any of them there. It was a white box: no furniture, no windows. One of Jimmy's men tried the door through which they'd entered. He pushed then kicked and it remained stubbornly closed.
"You're trapped too," Morgan said to Coby.
Alex thought he'd deny it, but he remained silent, and after a second he passed the shofar to Morgan. Morgan's hands shook as he took it, and she wondered what the artefact meant to him. It seemed to shiver the air around it, as if it burned with some unknown heat. But the Croatoans wouldn't simply have left it here for them to find, it made no sense.
At first she didn't notice it, a spreading yellow-green stain against the white. But when she felt the harsh taste against the back of her throat, she knew what she was seeing. A mist was settling over the room and the people in it. She coughed as she inhaled it.
"Gas," she gasped. "They're gassing us."
The men took a moment too long to react, gazes still locked on the shofar. By the time they turned, their hands were already clutched to their chests as they were shaken with racking coughs.
Jimmy's eyes locked on hers, small and bright and desperate. "Lady, it's now or never. Get us out of here."
She drew a breath and choked on it. Her head felt light and her eyesight was greying. The runes mocked her, a knot she couldn't untangle. But they were at the centre of the pattern now and finally she saw it - the end of the thread that bound this place together and trapped her inside it.
Her lungs burned with the poison gas and her eyes were blurry with tears. She forced herself to keep them open, on the spirit world and the mundane, as she reached out her hand towards the runes and the loose thread in the spirit trap. Her fingers passed through the physical wall and tried to close around something that wasn't quite real. She resisted the urge to tighten them and tightened her mind instead, squeezing it hard around the idea of a knot, and the way everything would just unravel once it was loosened.
Her head ached, her flesh felt bloated and her heart was beating hard and erratic, an unhealthy beat. She ignored it all and just pulled. The pattern of the runes tightened, and tightened - and then it all just fell apart. The runes frayed and fragmented and the building vanished from the spirit world, where it was never meant to be.
But it was still there in the real world, along with the poison gas that was killing everyone inside it. She tried to gasp in a breath and it burned down her throat and into her lungs, toxic and unnourishing. She needed to escape to the spirit world now. She could survive only a few more seconds here before her body starved of oxygen and died. She reached out with her mind as she turned to take a last look at Morgan and the men around him, ready to leave them behind.