Bookburners by Max Gladstone

Author:Max Gladstone [Gladstone, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Serial Box Publishing LLC
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

3.

The night was full of mist and coal smoke. Lights twinkled on the river, giving an illusion of life to the wavering reflection of the Shanghai skyline. Grace froze. The bite in the air, the wind off the water. Every sensation felt sharper, more real than anything had felt in years. As though a layer had been scraped from her skin, leaving her raw and open and … alive. An abandoned newspaper fluttered in the wind and skipped down the abandoned street. She didn’t need to catch up to it to know the date. This was the last night of her life. The night she had been born again as something else.

Grace felt a sudden sympathy for Sal, and ashamed of her uncharitable thoughts about her panic. It was one thing to live through someone else’s worst memory. It was another to find yourself suddenly immersed in your own.

“Grace?” said Liam. Of course Liam would have recognized the horizon by now. Shanghai was different in the 1920s, but the shape of the harbor, the feel of the air … some things were embedded in the heart of a place.

Grace readied herself before she turned to face the others. Her team would be relying on her, and she would not let them down. It was just as she had told Sal: She had survived this once, she could do it again.

Except that I didn’t.

By the time she faced Liam, his face was lined in concern, but Grace’s masks were back in place.

“We’re in Shanghai,” she confirmed in answer to the question he had not asked. “The year is 1928. This is the night I”—her voice caught for just an instant before she completed the thought—“the night we went after Antopov.”

There was a silence that greeted her words. Until Sal said, “You know, I’ve never met this Tom guy, but when I do, I really think I’m going to kill him.”

Get in line, thought Grace.

Liam’s expression was grim enough that she wondered if he wasn’t having similar thoughts himself. Then she noticed the blood leaking from beneath the bullet wound to his thigh, and revised her assessment of his expression from grim to pain. Sal came to a similar conclusion.

“Shit, are you still shot?”

“Looks like it.” Liam shifted his weight more firmly to his good leg. “But either it’ll get worse, and I’ll bleed out, or it won’t. Unless you have a lead on some non-1920s painkillers, there’s not much we can do about it.”

“Opium?” Sal suggested.

“Wrong century, and not funny,” said Grace.

“Not joking,” Sal muttered back.

Menchú cleared his throat. “Grace, are we safe here for the moment?”

Grace nodded. “For a little while.”

“Then I suggest we concentrate on making a plan. Liam’s wound has carried over from one memory to the next, but so has the oracle bone.”

Grace looked down and saw the etched turtle shell lying on the pavement at her feet. She had been so distracted, she hadn’t seen it earlier. She knelt down and picked it up. Touching it the first time had sent them here.

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