The Margins: The Commons, #2

By Michael Alan Peck

"I think I did something. Something someone really bad was counting on me to do. And I think you helped me."

 

Ray-Anne Blair isn't buying it. She just wants Paul Reid to forget about the imaginary place he says he needs to return to—and to stop calling her Rain.

 

Everyone wants something. Jeremy Johns wants to do well at his job, but the new office is strange. So is his boss, Mr. Truitt. Annie Brucker wants to understand how she ended up back with her abusive ex. Zach, her son, wants to know if he should trust whatever it is that speaks to him from the darkness of his closet—something so heavy it makes the floorboards creak. Jonas Porter, Audra Farrelly, Po the silent monk, and Charlene Moseley want to know why their colleagues and prospective Journeymen have disappeared, though the answer might spell the end of all existence.

 

Welcome to The Margins, a place that shouldn't be—but is, thanks to Paul and his friends. They thought they'd won. But they played right into the hands of an evil that anticipated their heroic act. Now realms are crossing over, the universe is collapsing, and it's up to those who created the danger to neutralize it.

 

No one said it would be easy. No one's sure it's even possible.

 

But this is where the difficult and the impossible abound. 

 

This is The Commons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Alan Peck
• Release date: Sep 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9780986082337

Book preview

Part I

Interregnum

1

A Drama That Wasn’t Theirs

Ray-Anne Blair knew the mob-movie rule about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. She also knew it didn’t work for her.

She didn’t have any enemies.

She had only one true friend.

And right now, she wasn’t even sure about him.

I don’t want to die, Rain, Paul Reid said. There’s just something I have to do.

Ray-Anne waited. Maybe Paul would give something away—some sort of tell that would let her know this was a game he was playing.

Trouble was, Paul meant every word.

So, no. Ray-Anne wasn’t sure about Paul at all.

The two of them sat in one of the common rooms at the Stella Grace House, a recovery facility that had a reciprocal agreement with New Beginnings Chicago. Their wicker chairs sported thick cushions with swirling galaxy patterns on them.

Pop Mike had been to see Paul before Ray-Anne and stayed for the few days he was able to get away from New Beginnings New York. He’d told Ray-Anne that stella was Latin for star, and the chairs backed him up.

The stellar chairs didn’t do anything to leaven Ray-Anne’s mood, however. She kept hooking the cuff of her sweater on a spike of broken wicker, and she was certain that before she left, she’d have a pull in her sleeve and would have to put the garment on death watch.

Death watch.

Was that what Paul was on now?

Rain—

That’s the second time you’ve called me that.

Still nothing to indicate that Paul was messing with her. So why the wrong name? He tried to inch closer so that their knees would touch, but she wouldn’t give him that. She folded her legs up under her.

And hooked her sleeve again.

Everything was terrible. Everything.

The kid on the other side of the room—the impossibly skinny one with the hair like a bed of nails—kept whistling the same bit of Vivaldi or Bach while he arranged and rearranged the little plastic Noah’s Ark animals surrounding him. He looped like a human sampler, refusing to continue with whatever piece it was but never granting her the mercy of stopping.

Did you know Hillary Clinton was born here? Paul said.

Ray-Anne didn’t tell him that was another place, but the mistake encouraged her. Maybe she was getting him to open up.

Paul tried to turn his ring—and found for the umpteenth time that he wasn’t wearing it. His disappointment gave her a tiny rush of shameful gratification. Did caring about someone become a desire to see them suffer a little just because they let you down?

Do you think you can get it back? Paul rubbed his vacant finger, and Ray-Anne’s schadenfreude made way for the returning grief of what he had tried to do to himself. I don’t know why they took it. It’s not dangerous.

The kid with the thirty-penny hair cycled through the notes again. His consistency was remarkable—the sequence the same every time, as if its source were a sound file and not pursed human lips.

Paul saw her irritation. Huey, he told the boy. Silent mode, please.

Silent mode.

Right.

A ringtone.

That was it. A living ringtone.

Maybe the kid learned that little segment from someone’s phone. Either way, he cut out the whistling and hummed to himself at a much more bearable volume.

Mozart, said Paul. But only that little part of it. I don’t think he even knows what he’s whistling. I didn’t until Pop Mike told me.

Not Bach, then. Pop Mike would have known, certainly. Of all his beloved classical, Amadeus was his favorite.

The weird thing? Paul leaned forward to make his point. I never heard Huey whistle before Pop Mike came here. Never. Not once.

Huey hummed and positioned his animals just so. He had quite a set to play with, and they all looked brand new, not the usual beat-up toys you’d find in a hospital or doctor’s office. He looked to be maybe ten years old—too old for plastic animals, probably—but there was something adultlike about how he arranged the figures.

The animals all faced a plastic ark with a hut on top and a boarding ramp from deck to ground. The assortment was an odd sampling of the animal kingdom that exposed the silliness of the Noah story. How had Noah and his wife managed to gather both beavers and gorillas before everything washed out?

The scale, too, was a problem, assuming the menagerie was all one set. The hippos, elephants, and aardvarks were all the same size. And the population wouldn’t fit into the ark in any manner that would be livable.

Paul watched Ray-Anne watch Huey. How did you get in here?

What do you mean?

Pop Mike was my legal guardian, so he has visitation rights. And after all this, I guess he might be again. But they’re not supposed to let anyone else in without asking me.

You don’t want me here?

Of course I do.

I cried. That’s why they let me in, Paul. I lost it.

Paul had nothing to say to that. He’d never seen Ray-Anne cry. He probably hadn’t thought her capable.

Nor had she.

You acted like you were upset?

I am upset, dumbass.

That stopped him again. She’d never called him names before, either.

So is Pop. Does that surprise you, too? Ray-Anne hadn’t expected to sound so harsh, but she didn’t let it bother her. Pop Mike left them alone for almost a year after launching New Beginnings Chicago because he wanted them to know he trusted them to run things. And now his first visit wasn’t to tell them how well they’d done or how proud he was.

No.

He had to come running because Paul decided to get cute with a bunch of pills and a plastic bag.

We’re both a little upset right now, Ray-Anne said. You should have seen him at Midway. I waited for a half hour after his flight left to make sure he got on.

Cowed, Paul had eyes only for the neutral territory of the ark and animals.

Huey.

There would be no two-by-two for Huey.

For one thing, whoever collected the assortment acquired more than a pair of each creature. There were at least three hippos and five lions. And Huey had carefully laid out a scenario that looked like nothing from the Bible. Noah and his wife weren’t trying to get the animals on board. It was more like they were fleeing a flood of beasts intent on devouring them.

The animals were closing in on all sides. Mrs. Noah was halfway up the gangplank, positioned to tell her laggard husband, loitering at the bottom, to speed it up if he hoped to save his hide.

Of course, that was all Ray-Anne’s imagining since the plastic figure was posed in a permanent state of standing calm, feet affixed to a base. In fact, it wasn’t clear how the missus avoided sliding down the steeply angled gangplank. Maybe Huey had glued her. Noah, just steps ahead of the encroaching horde, also stood stoically on a base of his own.

Still, there was something about the arrangement that suggested a mad struggle for self-preservation. If Ray-Anne side-eyed the scene, there was definitely the sense that Noah was flat-out running for it while his wife told him not to look back, whatever he did.

I haven’t slept in three weeks, said Paul.

Ray-Anne freed her sleeve from the wicker spike again. That’s not possible.

He tipped his head one way and then the other. I think a whole lot of things are possible. I’m just not sure I should admit it because I might not want to know what they are.

You can’t stay up for three weeks, Paul. You’d go crazy.

He started to laugh but stopped. There wasn’t much funny about that. Because maybe he had.

Edsel, the nurse who’d escorted Ray-Anne in earlier, entered the room to have a look around. A former Northwestern lineman whose imposing size was more than offset by a ready grin, he’d proven to be a soft touch when she broke down while begging to be allowed in. He smiled at Ray-Anne and Paul and ignored Huey altogether.

Ray-Anne couldn’t blame him. He probably had to put up with the eternally looping whistle every day.

Paul gave Edsel a nod to assure him everything was okay and waited for him to continue his rounds. There’s always the chance they didn’t take it from me to keep me from hurting myself, you know.

Take what?

My mother’s—my ring. Last night I had this sort of waking dream. Everybody in here was fighting over it. And I was thinking that’s the real reason they don’t want me to have it. It’s like it’s the One Ring or something. And everyone would kill for it.

Huey began whistling again.

I don’t think that’s it, though, Paul said. I mean, it’s against the rules for me to have anything personal in here because it’s safer that way. Nothing for us to argue over. But it’s convenient for them, too. I think they’re afraid the ring will help me remember what I need to do.

Ray-Anne wanted to tell him how nuts he sounded. And she would have, but she was hiding some wacky stuff of her own.

Things that should have happened only in dreams but occurred during the day, when she was awake and lucid. Things that were real enough for her to worry she might be hallucinating. Or that something was very wrong with her mind.

She couldn’t let anyone know—couldn’t land in a facility, like Paul. She couldn’t say why that was such a fear, but she did not want anyone cooping her up where she could be examined and have a data file started on her.

Ray-Anne had no concrete basis for that, but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t allow it. She also couldn’t tell Paul what it did to her to be in Stella Grace with him at the moment. Just as she couldn’t say why it freaked her out to have him call her Rain. That wasn’t her name, obviously.

But it was more than that.

Paul wasn’t the only one to say it—or to sound like he did. At least a couple of times a week, when someone said her name quickly or from a distance, the two syllables became one.

Just that morning, seeing Pop Mike off at the airport, she’d been sure he’d called her Rain when saying goodbye. It took the entire train ride back, orange line to red, for her to convince herself he hadn’t.

There was plenty of other strangeness, too. But Ray-Anne chose to tell herself it wasn’t really there.

Another thing, said Paul. It doesn’t hurt anymore.

What doesn’t?

My ankle. My collarbone. My ribs.

Another source of tension between them—one of so many, really, which made it kind of amazing that they were friends and sometimes seemed to have a shot at being more than that: Paul’s injuries and his refusal of any help in dealing with them. He was lucky to be alive, given the violence of the accident he’d survived. Yet he hated when anyone tried to cut him slack or extend him any sympathy at all, never mind suggesting that maybe painkillers might help with the aches and assorted discomforts that still plagued him.

No painkillers for Paul, thank you. He wanted nothing that might cloud his mind.

How could that be? Ray-Anne said.

Huey placed two more figurines—a squid and a peacock, both larger than any of the other animals, including the elephants—on the peak of the roof. He had no trouble balancing them.

I have no idea. But it’s the truth. Like I said, I haven’t slept. And all the pain is gone. It’s like my brain and my body are getting ready for something.

The squid and peacock defied gravity and surveyed the frightful scene below. They were rendered more sharply and painted with more care than the other animals, as if someone at the factory had taken it upon themselves to give the pair the artisanal treatment when a spray-machine job was sufficient for the aardvarks, giraffes, and the rest.

The higher-than-thou duo, one with formidable tentacles and the other boasting a proudly spread tail, stood regal and aloof above it all. They might have been willing to help Noah and Mrs. Noah with a bit of guidance, but not before the terrified humans reached the safety of the ark on their own. The two creatures radiated a reluctance to take sides in a drama that wasn’t theirs.

Paul started to say something, but reoriented himself in his chair instead, as if stopping just shy of a grave mistake.

Huey kept on whistling.

Ray-Anne’s sweater snagged on the wicker.

Did somebody really steal George Wickham?

At first, Ray-Anne had no clue who Paul meant. Then she remembered the African gray parrot that was kidnapped from its locked cage out in front of the Tuxedo Bar, the watering hole next to New Beginnings Chicago. Last weekend. Pop talked to Elsie, and they don’t know who did it. They’re hoping for a ransom demand or something, just so they know he’s alive.

During his short stay in the City of the Big Shoulders, Pop Mike had formed a surprisingly strong bond with the gray-braided Tuxedo owner, most likely because he and Elsie had similar pasts. They’d both been hippie dreamers who learned to temper their idealism, addressing the world with a nod toward reality and a reluctance to fall into cynicism. Plus, they shared a love of Jane Austen.

Huey continued placing animals around the ark. Even if Noah and his wife made it aboard safely, they’d need plenty of provisions in the hold. The attacking beasts might be patient enough to lay siege. And one could only hope that the peacock and the squid weren’t secretly in league with their brethren, intent on driving the humans onto the vessel and into their trap.

Hey, you know what room they have me in? When Ray-Anne didn’t answer, Paul forged ahead. Six-six-six. Kind of wild, huh? Why would you have that room in a place like this, with people like this?

Ray-Anne said nothing. She wanted to return to the only topic that mattered.

Paul shifted position again and tapped his foot on the floor a few times. I really let him down. Didn’t I?

You scared the hell out of him. Almost as much as you scared me.

Huey put two tigers and a leopard at the vanguard of a furry force mounting a rear-guard action at the ark’s stern. Or maybe it was the bow. It was tough for Ray-Anne to tell which was which. Also, she didn’t care.

I really didn’t want to die. I needed to get back.

To where?

I don’t know. Or maybe I just can’t say. But I think I did something. Something someone really bad was counting on me to do. Paul rubbed his eyes; Ray-Anne suspected it was because he didn’t want to look at her before finishing the thought. And I think you helped me.

Do what?

I don’t know. Paul watched Huey as the spike-headed boy contemplated his diorama like it might come to life at any moment and show them the way the ancient story should have played out. But I have to get out of here. Things are going to move fast.

What things?

I don’t know. Huey’s whistling loop filled the room, but Paul didn’t seem to hear him. But if I’m stuck here trying to convince them I’m not a danger to myself for even a couple more days, that’s not good.

Are you?

Paul’s reply was equal parts surprise and hurt. No.

Are you sure? When you walk out of here, are there more pills and another bag waiting?

Look, you have to believe me. You need to back me up so they let me out.

Because I swear to God, Paul—

I said no.

Huey stopped in mid-whistle and adjusted a gorilla.

How do I know you’re telling the truth?

I’ve been in here long enough to see the real problem.

Ray-Anne’s sweater caught on the wicker yet again. This time, she was sure she felt a bad pull. What problem?

I’m not going back to wherever I was trying to go. I don’t have to.

Huey rebooted his whistling Mozart loop.

Paul continued to ignore him, locking eyes with Ray-Anne.

It’s coming to us.

2

Triple J

Jeremy Jameson Johns hated the nickname Triple J. That was why his colleagues in the Perth Amboy office of Manitou Holdings used it on him. Everything at Manitou was about letting the market decide.

The market consisted of an environment where lower-level employees were jammed into tiny spaces like factory-farm hens, pitted against one another to determine who was the most ambitious and able.

There were a few important differences, however.

Factory-farm hens had their beaks trimmed so that they couldn’t do any real damage. Manitou would have made fighting spurs mandatory if management thought it would more efficiently identify the winners and losers among the toiling class.

That’s where the nicknames came in. Anything that could be used against a colleague in order to expose weakness was fair game. The nickname couldn’t be too demeaning or it would invite attention from HR. Were that to happen, the HR operative who dealt with the matter would most likely spank the offending party simply for being ham-fisted enough to force their involvement.

Clear violations of the HR handbook, with its rules against harassment and an overtly hostile environment, were seen as the hallmark of an amateur. Real operators had finesse. They saw the handbook as a friend—a collection of guiding principles for eliminating the competition and avoiding the guardrails.

The nickname did Jeremy one good turn. It helped him stand out in the eyes of Abel Dowd, his office mate.

This is Triple J, the analyst who introduced Jeremy to Abel said when he marched him into Abel’s space. He’s not like us. He’s principled.

The principled line did him the second good turn. Code for someone who management considered to be lacking in initiative because he allowed ethics and morals to get in the way of building power and capital, it was used to flag employees who were not to be trusted with anything sensitive. In Manitou’s case, sensitive meant company practices that, if publicly disclosed, would make the firm look bad.

After the analyst left the room, Abel asked Jeremy if he liked being called Triple J. When Jeremy admitted he did not, Abel didn’t require a reason—but he never uttered it again.

The principled part of the exchange came into play a few weeks later, when Jeremy was assigned to Abel as a mentee candidate. The assignment was a bad sign disguised as a good one.

On the surface, Manitou management was taking an interest in Jeremy and wanted to help him advance at the company. In reality, nobody at Jeremy’s level received mentoring unless they were in danger of being kicked to the curb. Management wanted to make sure the meager investment already made in such a person wouldn’t be wasted if there remained a chance of salvaging the arrangement.

Jeremy knew the drill. Abel was told to evaluate Jeremy as keep or cut. If it was keep, Abel would be responsible for his progress from there on out. Abel was considered to be someone who could give Jeremy critical guidance. He was a few bands above Jeremy in the hierarchy, which meant he had a lot more experience at the company. He also was at least ten years older than Jeremy, who at twenty-six was seen as a kid by whichever higher-level execs even knew he existed.

Until Abel set the meeting for their discovery discussion, Jeremy assumed the matter was a waste of time. He would be shown the door, as he had at several previous jobs. Having started his career—such as it was—in editorial work and having been laid off multiple times when the leading minds of various industries realized how little they cared about anything creative, Jeremy was well acquainted with the elimination of the unwanted.

First, they hired you as a contractor rather than a full-timer so that they didn’t have to pay benefits. That also made it easier to dump you. In fact, Jeremy thought it strange that they would consider him for a mentor at all when he wasn’t demonstrating a fighting spirit or working to destroy his peers. He’d thought for some time that his stint at Manitou would be limited.

Then Abel asked him to get together. And he scheduled the meeting for after work—at Billy Clyde’s, a wonderfully tattered dive bar on Ninth Avenue that was far enough from the most-trafficked commuting paths for them to relax without running into too many colleagues—if any.

Jeremy knew that Abel’s wanting him to come across the river from the lowly Perth Amboy environs meant one of two things. Either Abel was a jerk who didn’t care how much he inconvenienced Jeremy before helping the company jettison him, or Abel was a good guy who might be seriously considering trying to evaluate him.

Abel happily paid for a pitcher. And while he didn’t seem to be in a hurry to finish it, Jeremy assumed Abel wanted to keep things informal, letting the flow of the discussion determine whether there’d be a second.

They exchanged personal pleasantries for a while. Then Abel asked his first company-issued question. Let’s say you have a choice of two teams. Team one consists of a couple of A-level employees who are rock stars, and the rest are C-level. Team two is all B-level people. Which would you rather manage?

Jeremy, who hated such questions, decided to risk brutal honesty, which would either keep the conversation going to a fruitful conclusion or put him on the next bus out of Port Authority and back over the river to his apartment in Jersey City. What if I don’t want to manage anyone? What if I’m a doer, not a manager?

Abel wasn’t thrown at all, which was a good sign. The question doesn’t allow for that. The question assumes you’re a manager. Which is it? One or two?

If Abel was here to find out something about Jeremy, then Jeremy had a right to find out something about Abel. He drained his mug and thunked it down on the table’s scarred wood with just enough of a bang to make a statement. Three, he said. Death.

Abel took that in stride, too. He waited for Jeremy to continue.

Those situations only exist in dumb human-resources exercises. And I’d rather die than give it any more thought than that. He grabbed the Billy Clyde’s cocktail napkin from under his formerly frosted mug and wiped his mouth.

Abel deliberated, his face a cipher. Then he squinted, as if trying to see through a disguise that Jeremy might be wearing.

Abel wasn’t the only one studying him. Porthos, the human-friendly but cat-terrorizing bruiser of a formerly stray tabby taken in by Billy Clyde’s staff, lay along the top of the adjacent booth, staring with that combination of scorn and apathy that only members of his species could manage.

I did a web search on you, said Abel. Found some stuff, too. One notable item was a blog post that isn’t old enough for you to disavow. In it, you called the business side of your old company a bunch of money-lickers.

Jeremy remembered that well. He’d more than once considered deleting it. And he knew better than to try and claim it wasn’t his. I did.

Care to explain why you chose that term?

I couldn’t use the word I wanted to because I was hoping the post would go viral, and I was afraid it might get flagged for language. So I swapped out the first two letters after the hyphen.

Abel squinted again—for quite a bit longer this time, coming to what was clearly a meaningful decision.

He ordered another pitcher.

3

The Diasporas Began Anew

Almost all of the vet-a-lings made poutine out of whatever meal was served in the evenings. Stella Grace’s old-timers considered being included in the group, whose name was a combination of veteran and ding-a-ling, an honor because it meant you could hack it. And you could only be officially honored with the distinction by others who’d already made the cut.

Of course, they weren’t really old-timers. Anyone who’d been at the facility more than a year was included. Time and longevity were valued differently at Stella Grace, where one was seen as possessing a valued skill if he or she could remain twelve months without being cured and discharged or transferred to a facility for the truly bad cases.

It wasn’t really poutine, either, according to the guy who’d assigned the nickname to the dinner mess the patients smashed together. The former Stella Grace orderly, known to lore only as Ollie Quebec, used the term to describe what resulted from the patient practice of mixing whatever was served in an effort to mask or improve each individual offering’s sub-par flavor. Even on nights when nothing tasted like much, it was an attempt to bless the combined ingredients with any flavor at all—the hope being to luck into something that was greater than the sum of its parts.

Paul wasn’t at the poutine-making stage yet. Maybe it was his long years of knowing that any food that didn’t make you sick was better than no food at all. Or the fear that insulting the food gods by debasing their gifts might earn you a lesson.

Most likely, it was that Paul had looked up poutine and thought the official dish made sense: a blend of fries, bacon, mushrooms, cheese curds, and gravy—or some variation thereof. The Stella Grace take on it, which might be a mash-up of brussels sprouts, cauliflower, canned corn, and pork?

No.

No, thank you.

Huey Dusek wasn’t there yet, either. Huey Dusek never would be. Paul had yet to see the kid eat. For some reason, the staff never made him come to the table, as they did with the other patients. You sat down, and you made a good show of cleaning your plate. Because everyone knew what it meant if you didn’t, and poutine or no poutine was a much more comfortable way of taking in nutrients than being strapped into a bed with an IV or an NG tube. Yet somehow, Huey was allowed to eat or not eat according to his own schedule, according to whim.

That was one of Huey’s superpowers—remaining beneath notice. The staff left him to his own devices, and the other patients didn’t want to deal with him, either.

At first, Paul had felt bad for the kid and tried to get him to interact with others or, barring that, to convince others to pay some attention to him. Paul knew what it was to be odd man out, and it worried him that Huey spent so much time alone.

It didn’t take long for Paul to see he was wasting his time. Huey wasn’t interested in being socialized, while the other patients—and even the staff members—didn’t seem to grasp the concept of interacting with him. So Paul let it be, which was a familiar tactic. When all else failed, it was hard to argue against letting something innocuous stay the course.

After dinner, Paul found Huey in the Libra Room, which was one of the many smaller sitting, reading, or game rooms scattered around the floor—all named after constellations, all interchangeably suitable for the activities assigned to them. It was just a matter of what someone on staff had carefully chosen to place in a given space: a bookcase of aged hardbacks and dog-eared paperbacks with a few crack-screen e-readers in one, a scarred assortment of Trivial Pursuit, Yahtzee, Monopoly, and Scrabble in another, all with intermingled game pieces and dice.

Despite the rooms’ assigned purposes, books and games migrated through each, dropped cards and playing pieces gone AWOL marking their journeys. Every Sunday night, a grumpy staff member had to tidy up and put everything back where it belonged. Come Monday, the diasporas began anew.

Huey had replaced the room’s chess-table pieces with animals from the ark and had stopped, mid-game, to gaze out the window at the swaying trees in the hospital’s yard.

Hey, Paul said, dropping into the opponent’s chair. It slid unexpectedly, and he nearly smacked it into the table, which would have wreaked havoc on the board. He was fairly certain Huey would have been able to put everything back from memory, but he had no desire to prove it.

Huey acknowledged neither Paul’s presence nor the close call.

Paul picked up a seal, jumped an alligator with it, and removed the outmaneuvered reptile from the board.

Huey watched the trees.

Paul slid the seal to the opposite side of the board. King me.

When Huey did nothing, Paul launched into a seal bark and clapped his hands like flippers.

Huey showed no emotion, but he put the two animals back where they’d been. Wrong game.

I know. Are you Fischer or Kasparov in this one?

They never played each other.

That, Paul hadn’t known. Pop Mike had more than once tried to teach him chess and its history, stressing that the game and its emphasis on thinking several moves ahead had a lot to say about living life overall. Paul never really took to it. He’d tossed out the only two players he remembered.

The ark sat on a nearby windowsill, its remaining creatures out on deck, placed as if they all were watching the game’s progress. On top of the ark’s hut, the squid and the peacock watched from their higher vantage point.

Something about that was disquieting. He was glad he hadn’t knocked them off. Yet he also wasn’t sure they could be unseated. How come the peacock and the squid are always up in the nosebleed seats?

That’s the closest I can get to what they really are. There’s no way to make the others a part of them.

Sometimes it was best to let Huey’s answers stand on their own.

Outside, clouds blowing across the setting sun made a here-and-gone-and-here-again light show of the branch shadows on the east wall of the room. With the ebb and flow, Huey’s eyes were alternately cast in darkness and given the appearance of being lit from within.

She looks much better without the spider. Huey studied the board.

It took Paul a second to understand he hadn’t meant one of the animals on the board. Who?

Rain.

So Huey had picked up on the mutation of Ray-Anne’s name that got under her skin so. Paul had been certain Huey never listened. The spider?

It didn’t fit with anything else on her arms.

Now Paul was confused. If Huey was talking about Ray-Anne, she hadn’t had a bracelet or any jewelry on at all. All she wore was a watch. And arms? She’d been wearing long sleeves, so Huey hadn’t been able to see them. Even if he had, she didn’t have any ink on them. I’m sorry, Huey—what about her arms?

Huey shrugged.

Paul reached over to move one of the animals. He wanted to see if Huey would react again. When Huey didn’t, Paul jumped a tortoise with a monkey.

As soon as Paul took the tortoise from the board, Huey put it back. She’ll forgive you, Huey said.

Ray-Anne? For what?

You forgave her. She’ll forgive you. Huey turned back to the window. After that, nothing Paul did to the board could get a rise out of him.

A few hours later, after Paul had brushed his teeth, he stopped by the Libra Room again to see if Huey was still there. The boy was gone, but he’d replaced all of the animals Paul had moved.

Only now the situation was more dire. Noah and his wife were making a lonely stand on one side of the board, a wave of creatures attacking from the other in orderly fashion, each on its own square, like real pieces.

The humans were badly outnumbered.

And while Paul had never been much good at chess, he remembered enough to recognize one thing: a lion had Noah in checkmate.

4

Yet Here She Was

Audra Farrelly wasn’t supposed to be here. She’d done herself in. Because she’d had to.

And she’d taken enough attacking Ravagers down in flames with her to launch her name into the halls of legend. It was a second death of sorts and one that had been a rarity before the ascent of Brill—the first demise taking her from The Living World, the next removing her from The Commons.

A novelty at the time. That was before many of her Envoy colleagues joined her in the practice, most of them having less say in the matter than she had. According to the rules they’d all thought were in play, it wasn’t supposed to happen.

She certainly shouldn’t have come back again. Yet here she was.

Just when she’d gotten used to the sort of in-between, sporadic ghost state she’d attained in order to provide Porter with counsel during Paul Reid’s Journey, here she was. With all the familiar aches and pains a solid state entailed.

The problem was that she had no information whatsoever as to the location or nature of here. She’d gotten used to that, too, The Commons being a fickle place that called upon its servants, denizens, and operatives at odd hours and for odder reasons in the best of times, never mind after an eternity-long ordeal from which it had only recently been rescued and begun healing.

So sitting in what she guessed was some sort of corporate interview room—with sterile white walls, a table and two chairs, and faintly buzzing fluorescent lights above—was less of a surprise than it might earlier have been. Even the Ouija board had ceased to be a puzzling presence a few hours after she’d begun receiving messages on it from an unknown presence. And that had probably been a grand total of four or five days before, in L.W. time. Not that it mattered in The Commons, where if it were required, one could forego sleeping, eating, drinking, and all bodily functions just because the realm itself needed you working on something.

Audra tried not to ask too many questions. Which was an odd rule to follow when the only other thing in the room with her was an occult toy designed for providing answers.

All she knew was that there must have been a time when she wasn’t in the interview room. But then she was. There must have been a time when the board hadn’t been in there with her. But she couldn’t recall. It just was.

While Audra knew very little about the being with which she communicated, she knew two very important things and suspected another. She had a very strong feeling it was a fellow fire entity. Furthermore, she knew for sure that it was very, very powerful—probably the strongest thing she’d ever encountered in The Commons, and she’d come upon true strength in her time.

She knew it wanted something from her. Something simple but important.

And as a bonus fact, she knew that everything about this being and the current situation scared her nearly to a third death.

I don’t wish to frighten you. The words were spelled out letter by letter as the game’s planchette moved so quickly and with such force that Audra felt as if her arms would be yanked off her at the shoulders. Again, whoever or whatever was moving it was strong beyond her understanding while, she suspected, trying to be as gentle as possible. She didn’t know where she was, but she knew that the amount of influence and sheer will required to get the board in with her and communicate to such a degree put her own abilities to shame. It put a planet’s worth of Audras to shame.

It didn’t wish to frighten her.

Too late.

This didn’t feel like The Commons trying to influence or flat-out command her. Everything was different: color, taste, feeling, smell—you name it. But it was every bit as strong.

They’d been going back and forth on this one topic the entire time, the mystery fire entity revealing as little as possible and Audra trying to figure out what was going on. After all that time and effort, all she really knew was that the entity moving the planchette under her fingers was strong. It held back a tremendous amount of heat, which was saying something, given her own abilities. And it only needed one thing.

Audra believed that it didn’t mean to scare her. But that changed nothing. It only needed one word from her, and it seemed to know she’d already reached her decision after the lengthy and exhausting conversation had yielded so little. It all came down to her strong belief that she wouldn’t be going anywhere without reaching a decision on the matter at hand. And if The Commons had acquiesced enough to this being’s will to allow it to communicate with her, that was most likely a big clue as to what her answer should be.

No reason to prolong it. If she was right, she’d find out. If she was wrong, she’d discover that, too. But she doubted she’d be around long enough to understand why.

A third death. Was such a thing possible when she wasn’t sure she’d ever had a third or even a second life?

Audra removed her hands from the planchette and rubbed them together. It felt like a small bit of preparation to calm her for whatever would come next. She took a breath and let it out.

Try again. This time felt like it had more purpose to it. And it really was such a small thing to do.

Yes, she said.

The planchette gave a little jump on the board. Had the room suddenly gotten warmer? It hopped again, impatient for her follow-through. She’d said what she’d said, and while she supposed she could still change her mind, there was nothing telling her to consider doing so.

Audra gently placed her fingers back on the planchette.

At first, nothing happened. Then it slid slowly to the letter Y. It lingered there, somehow managing to both remain in place and communicate a startling amount of power and strength. Nothing in the known universe had ever sat still with so much force and presence. It was as if it were waiting for her to acclimate to her decision and its response.

The letter E. Now the power built upon that of the previous letter.

Audra was puzzled as to the source of the planchette’s trembling. It was her own hands.

The letter S. The force was now trebled, the presence of the whole word somehow more than the sum of its parts, especially since the fire entity had spelled it out rather than choosing the yes option at the top of the board.

Audra was just beginning to wonder what came next when she, the room around her, and whatever world lay beyond, erupted into flames.

5

A Long, Slow Decline

Jonas Porter had tried to convince himself it would work. Brill was gone. The Commons was already repairing itself. There was a huge backlog of Journeys to be conducted. And for every lost soul needing guidance, it seemed there was a corresponding Envoy or Envoy wannabe ready to use whatever ability he or she had to see that soul through to Journey’s End. Moreover, there were just as many former bureaucrats or bureaucrat aspirants who wanted to run the machine rather than serve as one of its cogs.

That’s where the problems started, as they did with any organization. Those who’d been in positions of authority before fleeing for their lives during the bloodiest part of Brill’s reign saw no reason why they shouldn’t return to running things now. Porter’s eternity of showing up to work just to keep Corps HQ from being eaten by the disuse protocol meant little to them. Thanks for your service, Jonas.

Which they were able to do because Porter, despite being the hero of the hour after guiding Paul Reid to a new day for The Commons, was happy to be sidelined as the man in charge. Mostly, he wanted to be outmaneuvered so that he could return to his true calling: Journeys.

Porter’s desire to lead went no further than overseeing a two-person team—him and a Journeyman. Two people, facing whatever The Commons could throw at them, with the standard heartbreaks, horrors, and heroism that brought them to a successful end, whatever the subsequent destination might be.

Porter remained nominally in charge but didn’t want to be. Even The Commons itself seemed to agree with him. The table he and Charlene Moseley covered with spreadsheet and graph printouts was still in the director’s office he’d commandeered many years before, though the office was now half its earlier size. The message was clear to Porter: the powers-that-be that were even higher than the self-appointed bureaucracy bigwigs saw his place in the hierarchy as smaller than it once had been.

Such was the artfulness of The Commons’ workings that anyone who hadn’t spent many years in its service would never know it had once been different. Ancient plaster walls had shifted to shrink the room without any sign of work being done. The woodwork was clad in the same multi-layered armor of paint. The space was less spacious. The window offered a more limited view of the world outside—and it had never offered much of one to begin with.

It’s not a pretty picture, Charlene said, shaking her Etch A Sketch with a little more vigor than was necessary until it went from showing a stunningly rendered three-dimensional graph to a simple-but-elegant table. Porter had to hand it to The Commons and its sense of nostalgia: it delighted in giving them tools, like his Newton and Charlene’s current device, that looked like the originals but operated at a level far beyond what was originally imagined.

It isn’t, Porter said, flipping from the printout of the graph to the printout of the table. He tried not to let Charlene see that by humoring him in his old-school preference of paper over pixels, she’d rendered him nearly helpless because fitting the data to paper required digits so tiny his reading glasses were useless.

But Porter didn’t need to read the numbers themselves to understand that The Commons, its Envoys, and its bureaucrats had a big problem on their hands. If the analytics were correct—and while Porter and his colleagues had initially blamed the systems they’d inherited from Brill for what had to be faulty reporting, the new systems came up with the same ones—they were looking at a mysterious leak of massive proportions. Simply put, the system was seeing a lot fewer new Journeymen and a great deal less Essence coming in. Nobody knew where any of it was going or why.

Even worse, only Porter and his few allies recognized the problem. Everyone else either didn’t want to talk about it or hoped it would fix itself.

The Commons was capable of righting itself once it decided to, just as the steam-abacus tracking of Porter’s early career had given way to the mag-card apparatus that had done its duty better than anyone expected.

Thus, when Brill’s old system began to show the slowing arrival of new Journeymen and the never-before-seen shortfall of Essence throughout The Commons, everyone just assumed it was a minor glitch.

Porter, Charlene, and June Medill believed that the Brill-era measurements might actually be right. Fewer dead were coming into The Commons. Some of the Essence that was already there was leaving. The big question was, where was it all going?

June Medill. The thought of her always distracted him. Was there any better statement of Porter’s new position within the Envoy hierarchy than having that little attack dog of a woman reporting to him? That wasn’t an easy question to answer.

For one thing, June Medill didn’t technically report to anyone. Porter and Charlene—who was the official head of active Envoy operations after Porter’s move to a higher and mostly-for-show title—never ordered June to do anything. They pointed out a challenge, and June determined her own way of addressing it.

That said, the woman was loyal as could be. She didn’t see her trimming, carving, and warping of assignments as insubordination. She viewed it as fulfilling the request Porter and Charlene should have made to begin with.

And the pit-bull part of her was indispensable when she sank her teeth into an antagonist.

They were their own little entity. And with rare exception, the bureaucrats were too busy to notice that Porter and Charlene, with the effective-but-abrasive assistance of June, were pretty much able to do whatever they wanted. The problem with rare exceptions, though, was that they were still exceptions.

They’re never going to believe us, Charlene said. "They haven’t yet. Why would they now? She gave the Etch A Sketch an aggressive shake to see if it would generate a new visualization to further bolster their case. But it redrew the same graph, which, while beautifully rendered to the point of looking like something you could reach into the screen and pull out, told its big-picture story in the simplest way: a steadily rising line plateaued for a time, then eased into a long, slow decline.

Porter held his century-of-service paperweight up to the sunlight beaming through the thick glass of his window, which, while smaller than it had been, still managed to capture its share of the afternoon rays. He sometimes was able to convince himself that the light was the rays of the same sunbeam that called the Shrine of the Lost home, come to visit and remind him he was still vital to the cause. But that was a foolish sentiment. Just as the hologram in the paperweight would only ever be a close approximation of him no matter how many different ways he tried tipping it, his value to the Corps would be minimal as long as he was a warrior without a war. Or an Envoy without a Journeyman.

When someone rapped on the doorjamb, the characteristic insistence of it told Porter who it was without him looking.

Good afternoon, Ms. Medill, Porter said, shifting to his most officious tone. June lapped up anything that nodded at corporate culture, and it was the least he could do to make her happy. What do you have for us?

It wasn’t enough this time. Nothing good, I’m afraid, Mr. Porter. June’s tone was a mix of concern and sadness, which was a damned sight better than the full-on fear Porter and Charlene had worked to ease out of her after her abuse at the hands of Brill’s regime. She handed over a sheaf of printouts. Unlike Charlene, who sullied her hands with paper only to suit Porter, June was a print devotee. Not only that, but she was masterful with print preferences, so the font was readily legible to Porter’s old eyes.

June now had Charlene’s attention, too.

I completed several rounds of verification before bothering you with this, but I’m confident in what I’m about to say. She shuffled through her copy of the report, flipped to the last page, and then went back to the front. She looked anything but confident.

It’s all right, June, Charlene said, aware that even if June had moved past her old terror of delivering disappointing news to management, she was struggling to do so now.

Tell us, and we’ll tackle it as a team, Porter said.

June licked her lips. Well, I pulled the transit report. And I hadn’t done that in some time—and I want to apologize for that—though it was still within the required interval.

Apologize? said Charlene.

June shuffled nervously in place. From the pattern I’m seeing, I don’t think it would have changed anything had I gotten this in front of you earlier, but part of me wonders if that’s only the case because I desperately need it to be. More shuffling. What I’m trying to tell you, sir—now she glanced Charlene’s way, despite herself—is that there are quite a few Railwaymen and Highwaymen who can’t be accounted for. Quite a few, sir.

Quite a few? said Porter.

Quite a few.

Okay. Porter placed his paperweight on the desk softly so as not to startle June or cause her to misinterpret the move as a fit of pique. They sometimes go dark on us, but they always come back online. How many?

Half.

If Charlene had been holding the paperweight, she might have dropped it. Half? Most of her earlier softness was gone.

Fifty percent, June said. I checked and verified.

Porter nodded, thinking.

Where’s Po?

I was about to ask that very thing, sir. That very thing. June shuffled her papers again, flipped to a page in the middle of the bunch and handed it to Charlene. If he’s reachable, may we ask him what he knows about demons?

Demons.

Yes, sir. June checked her print-out, as if hoping it would change so she wouldn’t have to say anymore about this. Day-trading demons. She handed the print-out to Porter. Who cheat.

6

The First Flashes of the Deluge

It was true that Paul hadn’t slept in three weeks. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t been dreaming.

Most of his long nights in Stella Grace were spent following the same routine, the regularity of which was a comfort to him. Paul had spent much of his life with no control over his time. So when he had a chance to create a faithful cycle that could be repeated or not, depending on what he felt like doing, he seized it. That routine became the rule, the practice a daily affirmation that he really did have some say-so in how he lived.

Paul’s nightly life in the dark—or as much dark as there was in a group facility—started out with him lying in bed until he was confident his fellow patients’ sleeping meds had kicked in. Then the strangeness could begin.

Not everyone was on knockout pills, so he avoided other nocturnal nomads if he could. Not because he didn’t like anyone else, but because he chose to use his insomnia for exploring himself and the world he was in—which felt, increasingly, quite different from the world he’d been born in.

The idea was to sit and try to feel his way into learning more about what this odd new place was. Conversation, or even the presence of someone else, interfered with that.

Paul wasn’t on any sleeping medication, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he had been. When he’d first arrived—after what they called his attempt at suicide and he called trying to right an unnamed wrong—they dosed him nightly.

To no effect.

He’d just get up and hit his usual nighttime places to occupy his mind. The reading room was first, followed by the game room and then the various group rooms, starting with the smallest and moving to the largest as he tried to find the right atmosphere for any given night.

Paul favored the reading room—not only for the books, but for the vibe. It was the energy from the volumes. From the people who’d sat in there, absorbed in story and information. Whatever it was, Paul often found himself pulling something out of a case at random and opening to whatever page happenstance chose for him. He’d then fall into a phrase, a paragraph, or an entire piece that comforted him or provided some insight into his current situation.

One long night, he grabbed a coverless copy of Moby Dick and chanced upon a line that said true places are not on any map. That gave him something to think about until sunrise. Paul believed he’d been to at least one true place in his life, but he couldn’t remember where.

Another time, in the game room, he’d watched an owl in a tree for hours.

It watched him back.

The entire time.

On this night, Paul spotted Huey in the smaller TV room with his ark buttoned up by his side, its animals safely stowed and awaiting the first flashes of the deluge. The television was off, but Huey stared at the screen, eyes half-lidded, as if whatever he saw there was the most tedious of reruns.

Paul had never seen Huey watch anything. He only ever came into a room with a TV when it was off.

He moved on before Huey spotted him. Or maybe Huey knew he was there but wasn’t in the mood for company, either. Other than Paul, Huey didn’t seem to want anyone but his animals around him.

And the love and regard with which he treated them was contagious. Nobody but Paul ever messed with the ark or its creatures. They never moved them around or futzed with them in any way, which was an unheard-of sign of respect, considering the ark wasn’t Huey’s personal property, as far as Paul knew.

A few hours later, Paul lay face-up on his bed, watching a house centipede cut a halting zigzag across the ceiling, its waving legs a field of wind-blown wheat. Other patients squashed the poor things when they could reach them. Paul wouldn’t end a life lightly, particularly after one of the orderlies told him the centipedes hunted bad bugs and, provided nobody killed them, could live for years.

The bigger the centipede crushed, the longer the streak cut short. You could take that upon yourself if you chose, but you had to understand and own the deed.

Understand and own the deed. Not a bad standard to live by.

Which brought Paul to the most interesting part of his nights. The current part.

Paul watched the centipede through closed lids. He wasn’t sleeping.