But she was still there. Pan. He could see her now, like she was standing right in front of him, and he wasn’t sure whether the ache in his stomach was because he liked her or hated her. She’d left him for dead, after all. Treated him like dirt. All the same, though, she was hot.
Leave it be, said Danny. Girl like that, she’ll be the death of you, literally.
“You’re one to talk,” he muttered. “Didn’t you sign up to the marines so you could impress Marcie Jones?”
No … said his brother. Danny had never been much good at lying, his mom had told him. I signed up to serve my country. Marcie had absolutely nothing to do with it. Besides, she worked at Walmart. She didn’t run around with a crossbow, killing things.
“Fair point,” he said, earning a suspicious look from a couple of old ladies walking past. Marlow clamped his mouth shut, keeping his eyes down. He already looked like a crazy bum, talking to himself wouldn’t help. He crossed onto the next block, sunlight flashing off the windows of the apartment buildings, everything drowning in the liquid heat, sounding muffled but perfectly clear in that weird way things always sounded in summer. Yeah, Pan was real, no doubt about it.
And if she was real, so was everything else.
He swore, reaching the end of the block. There was a whole bunch of green up ahead, a park or something, but halfway down to his right were the steps to the subway. He jogged down them, happy to get out of the sun, less happy to be back underground. He kept expecting something to explode, a creature to wrench its impossible body from the walls and lumber toward him. Keeping his head down, his fists clenched, he shouldered his way through the thin crowd toward the turnstiles. He didn’t have any money on him but it had never stopped him before, and he checked that the coast was clear before leaping the barrier and sprinting to the downtown platform.
It was a cattle train, rammed tight with sweating livestock, and Marlow clung on to the handrail as it tore beneath the city. As hot as it was down here, it felt good to be moving. Moving away from the police, away from the place where he’d been held prisoner. Away from his attackers, who’d filled his veins with poison. It’s what he did best, after all. He ran.
Now that he had some distance, it kind of made sense. They’d dosed him up so that nobody believed his story. It was a madman’s tale anyway, he figured, but making him a drunken madman had to help. What was it they’d said? The first rule or something, that the world couldn’t know.
“Steely Dan!” yelled a voice, right in his ear, almost making him jump out of his skin. He looked up, saw a guy with a huge belly and an even bigger beard breaking the cardinal rule of the subway—under no circumstances acknowledge any other passenger—in order to give him a rocker’s salute. Marlow smiled nervously at him and edged down the train, stopping only when that same thumping discomfort began to creep into his guts, vertigo making the whole train feel like it was tilting upside down.
He grabbed for the handrail, closing his eyes against the rush. When he opened them again and stared through the crowd he could have sworn he saw the same girl there, that stab of familiarity. Their eyes met for a second before the train rocked around a bend and she was lost in the swaying bodies.
Losing it, he told himself.
With any luck, the fact the police had let him go meant they were done with him. Nobody would believe his story, nobody would investigate it. He could just get on with his life. He sighed, loudly. His amazing, fulfilling, fantastic life. Now the churning in his gut was something else, something that might have been disappointment. It was making him feel hollow, like part of him was missing. Secrets are like a hole in your life, Herc had said. And he was right. Marlow would have to live with the not knowing for the rest of his days.
It doesn’t matter, he told himself. Just forget it.
He screwed his eyes shut, feeling the motion of the train, imagining the city far behind him, fading fast. The memories would be the same. They had to be. If he kept moving, then they’d vanish, in time. Yeah, it was good to be moving.
And he almost smiled, until he remembered where the train was taking him. South, to the ferry terminal. Back toward Staten Island. Back into the nightmare.
* * *
“Mom?”
Marlow hovered on the steps that led up to his front door, shuffling his feet. It was a decent enough place that he’d lived in since he was born, although it had seen better days. The blue paint had all but peeled away, like leprous skin. The filthy windows, too, were like eyes dulled with cataracts. The only new thing on the whole building was the satellite dish that spoon-fed his mom her stories day in, day out. He could hear the TV now, the dull roar of applause from some game show.
He eased the door open a couple of inches, his face pressed into the gloom beyond. It was dark inside, the way it was always dark inside, even on a day like this when the sun seemed hot enough to burn a mile underground. His mom had closed the curtains on the day of Danny’s wake and the shadows had never left.
“Yo, Mom, it’s me.”
There was a scrabbling of claws, a soft bark, then Donovan came trotting around the corner. The old mongrel—part Doberman, part English sheepdog, maybe part dalmatian, nobody really knew—slipped and slid on the wood, his tail beating so hard that his ass was almost ping-ponging off the walls. Marlow crouched down and ruffled the dog’s fur, that big, wet tongue slobbering over his face.
“Yeah, yeah,” Marlow said, holding Donovan’s massive paw. “I know, I missed you too, boy. Where’s Mom?”
There were noises in the kitchen, the clink of a glass.
“Mom?”
“Marly?” His mom’s face appeared around the corner, smiling, and he walked over and wrapped her in his arms, feeling like he couldn’t hug her too hard or he might break her. She was a bag of bones wrapped in a velour jumpsuit, her hair unbrushed, her skin too loose on her face. A badly made doll. But she hugged him back as hard as her skinny arms would let her, her glass slopping booze over his T-shirt. When he finally let go she smiled at him again.
“I was worried, sweetheart. You weren’t answering your phone. Where you been?”
“Nowhere,” he said, patting the dog as it limped in behind him. “Just out with Charlie. I crashed at his place. And I lost my phone.”
“You’re lying to me,” she said, walking across the tiny kitchen. There were bottles on the counter and it took her a couple of attempts before she found one that wasn’t empty, topping up her glass. His mom’s drunk wasn’t the kind that you could really notice—she never fell over, never started shouting and screaming, never really even slurred her words. But it was there, quiet, patient, like a parasite that controlled its host without them knowing.
“No, Mom, I—”
“Charlie stopped by, yesterday evening,” she said, leaning on the counter and taking a sip. She swallowed, grimacing. “Said he was looking for you.”
“Yeah, um,” Marlow tried to find an excuse inside the storm of his head. “Well, we had this school thing, we were supposed to be working on together, research and stuff, and—”
“And I got a call, from your principal.”
Oh crap.
“Mom, it’s not my fault.”
“I don’t want to hear it, Marlow,” she said. “You promised me.”
“He had it in for me, I could have been the model student and he still would have kicked me out.”
“So you didn’t scratch a … a nasty picture onto his car?”
Marlow chewed his knuckle, shuffling uncomfortably. The dog whined, his tail hanging between his legs, his eyes big and wet and sad. Marlow tickled his ear, more to cover his shame than anything else.
“It was a rocket ship,” he muttered, too low for her to hear.
“Marlow, you’re nearly sixteen. Why do you insist on acting like a child? This was your last chance. Your last chance. What about that was hard to understand?”
She took a sip of her drink and smudged a tear away, her tiny body shuddering.
“I don’t know what to do, Marly,” she said. “I don’t know what to do. I wish Danny was here, I wish your brother was here. He’d know.”
It was like a slap to the face, and Marlow couldn’t help but turn to the photo on the wall. Danny grinned at him through his shades, his skin thick with dust, his teeth the brightest thing in the kitchen.
“Mom, please, it will be okay, I promise,” he said, his throat swelling—not asthma this time but tears, ready to explode out of him. He clamped down, feeling the sting in his eyes. “I promise.”
“You promise?” she said, tipping back the glass and emptying it in one swallow. “Promises and lies, Marlow. I can’t stand it. You sound just like him.”
She didn’t have to say who. She was talking about his dad, a man he’d never even met but whose every shortfall he seemed to share. The accusation turned his tears to anger.
“I told you, it’s not my fault.”
“Yeah,” his mom said, fixing him with just about the coldest look he could imagine. “That was his line too. Right before he ran away.”
He opened his mouth to reply, found nothing there to say. He spun around, clenching his teeth against the wave of dizziness and nausea. Somehow he made it out of the living room, up the stairs into his bedroom. It was brighter in there, syrupy light seeping in through the filthy glass. But it still took everything he had not to run to the window and drop headfirst to the street where he wouldn’t feel that unbearable weight on his shoulders, like the whole house was resting there, the whole big, dark, screaming world.
Instead, he stripped off the clothes, slung on a fresh tee and some sweatpants and his old sneakers. He grabbed his spare inhaler, then bolted past his sad, old dog for the door.
FAST EXIT
They moved out as quickly and as smoothly as they had moved in. Like a rising tide, Pan thought, each wave so small and so quiet that you didn’t notice them creeping up the beach until your feet were soaked. Nobody said much as they traipsed out of the building. There wasn’t exactly much to talk about. Nothing good, anyway. And it was nice to get some peace and quiet.
Pan had almost managed to shut the elevator doors when Herc’s scarred hand slid through the gap. Her sigh of relief became a splutter of frustration as the big man clambered inside, slamming the gates behind him. He stood on a streak of fading blood that stretched along the floor, his boots squeaking as he spun to face her.
“How you holdin’ up?”
“Worse now than I was a second ago,” she grumbled. The doors closed and the cab rocked as it started to descend. She sighed again, not enough left inside her to have this conversation. She lifted a hand, placed it against her chest, against the scar she could feel beneath her tee. It was like a lump of hot coal had been stitched there, her body trying to repair a wound that it couldn’t even understand.
“You talked to Ostheim?” Herc asked, knowing full well what the answer was.
Pan felt her whole body slump. She closed her eyes, listened to the whining gears of the elevator.
“He needs to speak with you, Pan,” Herc said, and the rush of anger that rose from her gut was so fierce it scared her. She bit down on it, trapping her response behind her teeth, taking a deep breath through her nose.
“I know,” she hissed. The elevator growled, then thumped home. Herc snatched the gates open, let her out first. The building was an empty office tower, abandoned when it was only half-finished by an insolvent developer—one of an endless list of deserted buildings they’d already used that year. She marched through the empty lobby, just wanting to be out in the sun, wanting to leave all of this behind her. Keep walking, keep walking, keep walking.
“Pan.” Herc’s voice was like a choke chain around her throat, stopping her dead. She looked back, saw him lob a cell phone her way. She snatched it out of the air, fought the instinct to throw it back like it was a live grenade. Herc stood in the flickering fluorescent light of the elevator, shrugged his big shoulders. “He’s on now.”
She punched through the doors into the noise and heat of the street, clutching the cell so hard she thought it might splinter into pieces. No such luck. She barged past the people, swearing at the ones who didn’t get out of her way, ducking into the nearest alleyway. For a second or two she stood in the muggy shadows, took a couple of breaths of exhausted air. She could almost feel her employer there, a presence at the end of her arm, and she wondered if somehow he could see her, if he’d hacked into the phone’s camera, or a nearby CCTV camera, or a even a satellite. She glanced nervously up at the white-blue sky. There wasn’t much that Ostheim couldn’t do. She lifted the cell.
“Ostheim.”
“And here’s me thinking you’d left off without so much as a letter of notice,” he replied, that familiar accent that was half German, half somewhere even farther away. She’d never been able to place it, and as she’d never actually met Ostheim, or so much as seen a photo of the man, she had no other clues as to his whereabouts. “But it’s good to hear your voice, Pan. For a second back there, I thought we’d lost you.”
“For a second, you did.”
“So I heard. How was it?”
“Death?” Pan swallowed, her throat parched. She could still feel it, invisible hands reaching through her skin, through her bones and muscles, grabbing hold of something even deeper, ready to rip it away and drag it down to wherever it was they came from. She wrapped her free hand around her stomach as if to hold in her soul, worried that now it had been wrenched loose it might simply fall out. It was almost too much, and she leaned back against the warm bricks, sliding down into a nest of old newspaper.
“Pan?” She’d almost forgotten he was there, his voice making her jump.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fair enough,” he replied, as bright as always. “But you know I’m here if you need me. Just a phone call away. I’ve been doing this a long time, Pan, I know what it’s like.”
To feel the very essence of you almost torn away? I doubt it.
“Anything you need, you just let me know. Anything at all.”
“How about a reference for a new job?” She spluttered a humorless laugh at her own joke.
“You know you can get out any time. All you’ve got to do is say the word. We’ll set you up, you’ll never have to worry about anything again. Is that what you want?”
Yeah, and then what? A job at McDonald’s? Sharing a small apartment with a roommate and a poodle called Herc? She wasn’t sure if the thought made her want to laugh again, or just weep. This was all she knew. And a life without the Engine, without the things it gave her … that was no kind of life. No, she wasn’t going back.
“All you got to do is—”
“Shut up, Shep,” she said. “I told you, I’m fine. What’s next?”
She could almost hear him smiling, like he’d known exactly what she was going to say. He probably had, the smug bastard. Ostheim knew everything.
“Next is you tell me what went wrong.”
“Hasn’t Herc already debriefed?”
“He has, but I want to hear it from you.”
Great. Pan pushed herself up, pacing down into the darkness of the back of the alley. Behind her she heard car horns and children shouting, somebody barking out a laugh loud enough to echo off the walls. She tried to tune it out, thinking back, back past the tower, back past the hospital, back past the van as it barreled down the expressway, back to yesterday morning.
“It went wrong,” she said, knowing even as she spoke that it was the most pointless statement in the history of statements. “The target, he wasn’t there.”
Their objective had been simple: to infiltrate the suspected home of a guy called Patrick Rebarre. He was an Engineer who worked for the other side, a creep whose sole purpose was to bring about the end of the world. He’d deserved to die, and she’d been more than willing to do it. That was a soldier’s job, right? Take out the enemy.
The onl
y problem was he hadn’t been there.
“We breached the house, Ostheim,” she said.
“And…”
“And somebody had beaten us to it. His security team was dead, three bodyguards left on the floor like … like dog food.”
She could see them now. Not just killed but turned inside out.
Literally.
“You found his body?” Ostheim asked.
“Rebarre?” Pan shook her head. “No, he’d gone.”
No corpse, no clues, no nothing.
“You think somebody warned him?”
“I think…” She swallowed hard to keep down the boiling contents of her stomach. “I think he did.”
Mammon, said her brain before she had the chance to stop it. She glanced behind her, just in case thinking about him somehow managed to conjure him. Stranger things were possible, after all. But there was just the alley, and the world beyond, oblivious to the knowledge that monsters walked in their midst. She rubbed her churning gut, forcing herself to speak.
“It was a trap. I knew something was wrong as soon as we breached. There was something in the air, something that shouldn’t have been there. You’ve been around the Pentarchy, Ostheim, you know the stench they leave behind.”
The Pentarchy. The Five. They’d be considered gods if they weren’t already devils.
“But you didn’t actually see him?” Ostheim asked.
“I didn’t need to. He was there.”
“Then we have to assume he followed you,” Ostheim said. “Or at least tracked you. There was no sign of him at the hospital?”
“No. I think we lost him.”
“You didn’t,” Ostheim said. “Just stay alert. You know I don’t have to tell you how dangerous this could be. Out of all of them, he’s the worst. He can tear your soul apart with far greater efficiency than the demons can.”
She wrapped her free hand around herself, holding her shaking body as tight as she could. She needed to be whole again, needed to be protected, needed to be immortal.