Authors: Derryl Murphy
Father Thomas
didn’t smile again. Instead, the look on his face was a sober one. He picked up
the box in its paper wrapper and handed it over to Dom. “This item found you,”
he said. “I’d like to say it was me, but it wasn’t. It was the numbers on the
wrapping paper, which then called me.”
Dom turned the
box around in his hands, looking at it more closely than before. There were
subtleties, the likes of which he’d never seen before, written there, a grasp
of numeracy that almost made him feel like a rank amateur.
He made to hand
it back, but Father Thomas shook his head. “You have to keep it. As I said, it
chose you.”
“Chose me?”
asked Dom. “To do what?”
“It
knew that Napier’s shadow has been after you. I imagine it could smell it on
you, could taste it in the numbers that try to follow you. There is a
particular taint to those numbers, if you know what it is you’re looking for.”
Once again he stubbed out a smoke, lit up another.
“That
still doesn’t answer the question, though. Why me?”
Father Thomas
pointed at the wrapped box. “Inside that paper is an artefact that needs to be
moved, now that Napier’s adjunct is on the loose. The numbers written into the
wrapping have always protected it, but those same numbers have apparently
decided that you’re the people to take it to safety.”
“Where is this
safe place?” asked Jenna.
“Scotland,”
replied Father Thomas, and he grinned again.
“Scotland? Why
do we need to take this back to Napier’s seat? And what the hell is in this,
anyhow?” He tried to tear at the paper, and although it didn’t shock him this
time, the numbers written there congealed under his fingernails, rebuffed any
attempt to rip it open. “Damn it, I’ve never seen numbers like these.”
“You won’t open
it,” said Father Thomas. “Not unless the numbers let you.”
“You make it
sound like the numbers are alive,” said Jenna.
Before the
former priest could answer, Dom said, “So we take this to Scotland because the
Napier artefact from the desert can’t cross the ocean.”
Father Thomas
shook his head. “No, I said that we couldn’t take it across the ocean. I
suspect now that there is a new host, they won’t have any trouble crossing
over.”
“Then why should
we be the ones?” asked Billy. “And you still haven’t told us why it needs to go
to Scotland.”
“Because Napier
is pissed off with you, and he is going to hunt you down no matter where you
go. Because no matter how strong you are, and I can see that you are quite the
talent, there’s no way you’ll be able to handle an already strong numerate
coupled with the two of the strongest numerates in history.” He chewed on his
lower lip for a few seconds. “As to why Scotland, well, now that Napier is
loose, there’s no way that package you’re carrying will be able to go anywhere
else. The numbers won’t allow it.”
Billy turned and
looked at Jenna. “There he goes again, talking like the numbers are
intelligent.”
Father Thomas
shrugged, but didn’t say anything.
But Dom pressed
on with the other concern. “And so she and her adjuncts kill us there instead
of here.” He was feeling angry now, partly at what he was being told, partly at
the fatalism he could feel sinking into his heart. “What’s the difference?”
“The difference
is that when you’re in Scotland there’s an artefact you can use to help
yourself. And who knows, if you keep getting away at the last possible second
like you’ve apparently been doing since this trio started to chase you, even
they may start to believe that it wasn’t meant to be.” He glanced at Jenna as
he said this, then looked back to Dom.
“So what do we
need to do?”
“When you leave
this room, I’ll have two tickets to Glasgow. I’ve redone the numbers on your
passports, removed your numerical smell to keep your pursuer off your tail for
awhile. Rent a car when you get there.”
“And then?”
“And
then wait for the numbers to talk to you.” He took another drag, blew his smoke
to the side, and leaned forward, getting his face as close to Dom’s as he
could. He reeked of both stale and fresh tobacco, with a background tinge of
alcohol.
“What the hell
do you mean, wait for the numbers to talk to me?” asked Dom, breathing through
his mouth to keep the smell down.
Father Thomas
smiled. “You’ll have to wait and see.” He took another puff and waved his hand.
“I don’t mean to be stupidly mysterious.”
“Where do we
take this thing once we’re there?”
“In a perfect
world, you’d land at the airport and meet a priest I sometimes work with, and
then he’d take you on to a place where it can be hidden away. If we were lucky,
you could even get it all the way to the Vatican where we have a secure storage
facility, although you would have to keep it on your person the entire time.”
He exhaled two thick streams of smoke out through his nostrils. “But here is
where we have the Catch-22 of this operation: you can’t do that because the
Napier adjunct is on your tail, but you couldn’t access the artefact before now
precisely because
Napier wasn’t on the loose. And, with all of that in
the mix, the artefact wants to be nowhere other than Scotland.”
Dom leaned
forward, head in hands. “Jesus. This is sounding like a nasty little maze.”
“So will we ever
get this thing to this priest?” asked Jenna.
“I doubt it. In
fact, I probably won’t even tell him you’re coming. Not because of the whole
death-to-papists thing, but because of what might happen to the secure facility
he runs if word got out to some who don’t know about or don’t believe in
numeracy. The last thing we would want is for these artefacts to be unleashed
on the world, or for some sap with an undetected numerate capability trying to
exorcize the so-called demons.”
He opened the
envelope, shook the contents out onto his lap. “Here are your airline tickets.
The names match your passports. I’ve taken the liberty of reconstituting all of
the numbers on your ID, although it’s all been changed to help keep Napier off
your tail.”
“What if I don’t
want to go?”
He shrugged his
shoulders. “I can’t make you, but I hope that the chance to escape what looks
like someone trying to kill you would give you pause about anything so
foolish.” He squinted, looking pained by some thought. “I suppose there is
something else I should tell you, even though it may make you want to stay
here.”
Jenna sat forward
in her chair. “What’s that?”
“This woman
chasing after the two of you—Jenna, she was your mother.”
The room around
Dom suddenly began to spin wildly, numbers unimaginable in their quantities and
almost unrecognizable in their form piling up everywhere, bubbling up and
pouring out of everywhere as well, and now, for a moment longer than any of the
others, he once again found himself looking at the world through Jenna’s eyes.
“What?” The
sound that came out of Jenna’s mouth was a shriek, an agony that Dom could feel
as well as hear, still somehow inside her head as he was. She stood up, the
chair tumbling over backwards and travel papers scattering across the floor.
Dom watched as his body jumped up as well, as Billy put out an arm in an
awkward attempt to comfort her.
And then he was
back in his own body once again. He shook his head to clear it of the wrongness
of everything he’d seen with the numbers, then looked sharply at the former
priest, not prepared to say anything right now about what had just happened to
him. “You said the woman
was
her mother. What the hell does that
mean?”
Father Thomas
looked grim, and shook his head, and Dom realized with a start that he hadn’t
seen anything of the strange numbers that had appeared when Jenna had been so shocked.
“Whatever happened to her, she was subsumed by the Napier adjunct long before
she actually laid hands on the artefact. I didn’t know it when I first met
her—she was able to shield herself remarkably well, a strength there that I had
never seen before.”
Jenna looked up,
wiped tears and snot from her face and said, “I have to stay. I need to talk to
her, tell her who I am. I can convince her to stop chasing us.”
“She already
knows who you are,” said Billy.
Jenna turned and
looked at him, angry now. “How can you say such a thing?”
Billy shrugged
Dom’s shoulders. “I’m sorry to tell you, Jenna, I truly am, but she must have
picked up your scent down in Logan, the first time you found us.”
“Yeah,” said
Dom, twigging on. “That explains how she was able to track back at the pay
phone. You’re family, Jenna, any numbers you leave lying around would be easy
for her to sniff out.” He turned and looked back to Father Thomas. “Maybe she
only wants to kill me and Billy.”
“As I said,
anything left of Jenna’s mother has been subsumed,” repeated the former priest.
“Much the same as it was for Archimedes, I imagine. If Napier was too strong
for her to resist when he was just a shadow in a distant artefact, then there
is no way that she is able to fend him off when he occupies her body. She’s a
puppet, a powerful numerate pulled into a close orbit around one who is even
more powerful. She won’t escape, and she won’t ever be the mother you once
knew.”
Jenna sank down
to the floor, body heaving with quiet sobs. Dom knelt down and cautiously put
his arm back around her shoulders. “Hey,” he said, leaning in close to her
right ear. “Maybe we get this thing to wherever it belongs, and Napier realizes
he has to give up, cuts loose and you get your mother back.”
The look she
gave him was a mixture of disgust and pity. Then she managed a small smile.
“That’s not at all likely and you know it.” She sniffed and wiped some more
tears from her face, then stood back up. Dom stood beside her, unsure where to
go with this. “I’ll go,” said Jenna. Her hands were shaking. “If my mom is
going to get to know her daughter, it’s as someone who stayed strong and didn’t
give up.”
Father Thomas
nodded and smiled and lit yet another smoke. “She was the best choice, I
thought. Mormon, which is so far from Catholic that she would’ve been safe from
any little booby traps that might have been laid into it.” He gave her a gentle
smile, which just looked moderately rather than extremely predatory.
“Did . . . did
you send her away from me and my dad?”
He shook his
head. “She was gone long before we met up, following the scent of the numbers
for years before I became aware of her.” He shook his head, staring at the wall
on the far side of the room. “Whatever hold Napier got on her must have started
with that trip, but she was able to fight it off for a good three years before
she had to go answer the call.”
Jenna scooped up
the papers that had fallen to the floor, looked them over. “Right,” she said,
voice barely a whisper. She looked at Dom. “What do you say we get going?”
He felt pinned
against the wall, by the painful look in her eyes, by the situation, and by his
fear that he would end up as some sort of strange adjunct to Jenna again. But
it felt more and more like a guaranteed loss for the home team if he stuck
around, and he couldn’t go and abandon her now. He reached over and squeezed
her hand. The rational part of him sure as hell didn’t trust the former priest,
but the numbers he could sense coming out of this showed that they didn’t have
any other alternatives, and looking at Jenna he could tell that, shocked as she
was by the news, what numbers she could see seemed to tell her the same thing.
He sighed. “Okay.”
The former
priest smiled again; to Dom’s eyes, this time he looked somewhat relieved.
“Your flight leaves in ten hours. We have a well-shielded car, so you’ll get a
ride to the airport. As well, keeping that package on your person should keep
prying eyes off of you long enough.”
“I have my own
mojo,” said Dom.
“Why, yes you
do,” replied Father Thomas. “However, it all carries your scent. Anyone who
knows what they’re looking for can eventually crawl through the cover and find
you. I’d hate for that to happen while you’re thirty-five thousand feet over
the Atlantic, not just for the two of you but for the hundreds of others who
will be sharing your flight. The packaging on that box will smear away any
approaching search numbers and, I think, will also send out some false numbers
every once in awhile; think of those numbers as chaff. For the moment it’s your
best chance of keeping safe, at least until you’re in Scotland and can start
taking advantage of some of the things that are built into the memory of the
land there.” He walked over and opened the door. “Come with me. The two of you
can have a nap, then freshen up before we get you to the airport. Your flight
is a red-eye.”
Somehow, Dom did
manage to sleep, crashed on the cot where he’d been laid out after taking the
knock to the head. Jenna slept on the other cot in the room, but when Dom woke
up he could hear she was already in the shower in the attached restroom. He sat
up. Father Thomas was gone. On an old and ratty green couch were suitcases,
already packed for the two of them. Dom investigated his, laying things out in
neat little piles on the scarred pine coffee table; everything he tried on was
a perfect fit. Hell, there was even a paperback novel, a thriller that he
hadn’t read and that looked at least marginally interesting.
When Jenna was
done, he took his turn, cleaned up thoroughly in view of the upcoming long day
aboard a plane. As he shampooed his hair he felt for the bump on the back of
his head, but it had completely receded.
Once out of the
shower and dried off, he brushed his teeth in front of the dirty mirror, spit
into the cracked china sink, then said to Billy, “You’ve been quiet. Same thing
happen to you this time?”
“The same
thing?” He watched in the mirror as his forehead wrinkled into a frown. “Do you
mean you ended up looking out from Jenna’s eyes again?”