Unbound (17 page)

“Thank you.” Whatever his intentions, the presence of the thousand-year-old book had burned through my fatigue, leaving eagerness and excitement in its wake. I brought the book and printout to my writing desk and sat down to study Gerbert d’Aurillac’s poem to Otto II, comparing it to my own notes. This was simpler, yes, but both poems shared some of the same basic structure.

The first page of the solution looked like a word search, only instead of straight lines, the words were hidden in the shapes of Arabic numerals and Greek letters. “‘From Gerbert to Otto,’” I read, tracing the loops of a Celtic knot. The puzzle used the letters of Otto’s name just as the poem in my mind used Anna’s. Each of those letters marked the beginning of a line of text to be stacked one atop the next, creating the grid for the word search.

“Breakfast should be here in an hour,” Gutenberg said. “If you and your companions have any preferences . . .”

I shooed him away and turned the page, then snatched up my pencil and began to write.

According to the notes Gutenberg had provided, Gerbert d’Aurillac’s original poem to Otto II would have come with thirty-two pages of instructions.

The poem d’Aurillac had planted in my head came with a total of zero.

Once the raw poem was complete, I copied out each line of text to create the word search grid, starting each line with the larger letters from Anna’s name. But how to arrange them?
Did I work from the inside out or vice versa? Clockwise or counterclockwise? There were fourteen As and Ns, breaking the poem into a total of twenty-six segments, most of which had two or three lines of text. With sixty-four lines in total, there were too many possibilities to simply guess.

I tried following the pattern used to translate Otto II’s poem, but after three hours of rearranging and staring, I had yet to find a single hidden word or phrase.

I cut each line onto its own strip of graph paper, which kept the letters evenly spaced and allowed me to move them about. In order to search for word shapes, I borrowed one of Nicola’s computers to scan, enlarge, and print the “answer key” to d’Aurillac’s older poem. Squares of clear plastic cut from a large freezer bag, plus a black permanent marker, let me trace templates of the shapes from that poem. But no matter how I slid them around, I found nothing in his poem for Anna.

Either the shapes were wrong, or else I hadn’t found the proper sequence for putting the text together. I considered asking Gutenberg if he could yank a magic code-breaker out of a book, but if it was that simple, I’m sure he would have done it by now.

Gutenberg and Ponce de Leon crossed the room, heading for Nicola and the computers. Gutenberg was talking sharply into his phone. “Tell Mohamed an automaton will be there in two minutes. He needs to— No, that’s what Meridiana wants. Karim is already dead. If he tries to rescue the body, she’ll take him, too.” He peered over Nicola’s shoulder at one of the screens and muttered to himself what sounded like a Middle High German curse. “If Mohamed so much as cracks a book before the automaton arrives, you take him down yourself, understand?”

“Won’t work,” said Ponce de Leon. “Mohamed and Karim were siblings, and he’s too skilled a fighter. Tell her to throw up a sandstorm if she can. It will hold him back and buy them time.”

“A sandstorm against a kishi?” Gutenberg snapped. “The
damned thing has two faces. Blind the human face, and the hyena will track them by scent.”

“Mohamed . . . isn’t he the one who likes to use the
Guinness Book of Records
?”

Gutenberg nodded.

Ponce de Leon grinned. “Trinidad Scorpion Pepper.”

“Ha!” Gutenberg spun away. “Tell Mohamed to rip open his
Guinness
and hit that thing with the essence of the Trinidad Scorpion Pepper. Whatever you do, make sure the wind is blowing
away
from you both.”

I found myself holding my breath along with them and counting the seconds. How long had it been since Gutenberg sent the automaton?

“Good.” Gutenberg stepped back and ran a finger through his hair. “Now get the hell out of there.”

Ponce de Leon clapped Gutenberg’s back. Gutenberg waited a moment longer, then ended the call.

“Meridiana?” asked Nicola.

“She’s hunting us like animals.” Gutenberg fumbled his electronic cigarette out of his pocket. “She captured Karim, allowed her ghosts to seize control of the body, and used it as bait. I’m sending Barbara Palmer down there to clean up the mess. Mohamed needs a firm hand to keep him from doing anything stupid, and it will get Babs off my back.”

Babs was a Regional Master from down south. Other Porters called her the “Tex-Mex Libriomancer,” but never to her face. I didn’t know her background, but if she was giving Gutenberg a hard time, I liked her.

“If Meridiana is chasing random Porters, it means she hasn’t found our location yet,” Ponce de Leon pointed out.

“So instead she’s taunting us,” Gutenberg snapped. “Showing the Porters I can’t protect them. Pushing them until they burn themselves out trying to fight her with magic, and once that happens, she crawls into their thoughts and seizes control.”

“You can’t fight every battle yourself,” Ponce de Leon said.

Gutenberg shrugged him off. “Meridiana’s ghosts unravel
our magic faster than we can create it. Unless we find a better means to fight her, she’ll continue to eliminate us one by one.”

“You saved two lives today.”

“And I lost a third.” Gutenberg flung his electronic cigarette at the window so hard I was amazed it didn’t break.

“How long has it been since you slept?” Nidhi yawned as she entered the living room. Lena followed behind her.

“Years,” snapped Gutenberg. “Not since Nancy Kress released
Beggars in Spain
. I don’t have time to sleep. You’d think immortality would give you more time to accomplish things. Instead, every year lengthens the list of what must be done, and time slips past ever faster.” He strode over to retrieve his cigarette. “My apologies. Did we wake you?”

“Yes.” Nidhi walked up to Gutenberg and poked him in the chest. “You’re still human. More or less. Maybe your body doesn’t need to sleep, but your mind needs a break. Go watch a movie. Read a book. Play Monopoly. Nicola will let you know if there’s another emergency.”

He played with his beard, twisting it into a point. “I complain of having too little time, and your advice is to play Monopoly?”

“When was the last time you checked in with your therapist?” Nidhi asked.

Gutenberg frowned. “The network connection isn’t secure enough, and the bandwidth—”

“I didn’t ask for excuses, I asked how long?”

He blinked, and his lips quirked upward. “Two months,” he admitted. “Maybe three.”

Porter gossip suggested Gutenberg’s therapist was a 130-year-old woman whose mind had been transferred to a computer system in the late seventies. Gutenberg’s comments about connectivity suggested there might be truth to the story. I would have loved to learn how that had all come about.

“That’s the reason I’m here, right?” Nidhi circled around the bar and dug through the fridge. She surfaced with a small bottle of orange juice. “To protect me and prevent me from being used against Lena and Isaac, sure. But also because you
know you need someone keeping an eye on your mental health. You’ve always known.”

Ponce de Leon looked back and forth between them, as if he were appreciating a particularly exciting game of ping pong.

“It is my
professional
opinion that you are physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted,” Nidhi continued. “If you don’t take a break, you’re going to get your people killed.”

Gutenberg retrieved his cigarette from the floor and sighed. “Damned therapists,” he muttered. “One hour. That’s all I can give you.”

“One hour?” Ponce de Leon pulled a deck of cards from his suit pocket. “That should give me plenty of time to trounce you in Noddy.”

“I’m not playing with any deck you’ve had your hands on,” Gutenberg said sharply.

“You didn’t seem to object when I— Oh, I’m sorry. Did you say
deck?
” He limped into the hallway, cutting the cards one-handed as he walked. Gutenberg shook his head, but followed.

I coughed to hide my laughter. On a whim, I turned back to my work and tried searching for patterns of letters that would correspond to the pips on various playing cards. I did find the word “muria,” which meant
to pickle
, but I was pretty sure that was just coincidence.

Lena had brought Smudge out with her. She grabbed a banana and offered him a chunk, but he refused. With a shrug, she popped the piece into her mouth and came over to study my work. She stopped several feet from the table. Smudge was calm for the moment, but neither of us were about to risk him getting close to a thousand-year-old book.

“It’s still wrong,” I said.

“Everyone makes mistakes.”

“That’s not it. I wrote the poem exactly as he did, and it was right when he used it. But it’s not anymore.”

“Maybe
you
need to take an hour to play a little naughty,” she said.

“Noddy, not naughty. It was an early version of cribbage from the sixteenth cent—oh.”

She chuckled sadly. “What are we going to do with you?” Before I could respond, her eyes fell upon an antique-looking floor lamp that hadn’t been there the day before. A post-it note with Lena’s name on it was stuck to the stained glass hood.

She dragged a chair over, turned on the lamp, and stretched like a cat in a sunbeam. “Mm. We are definitely getting one of these at your house. And another for Nidhi’s apartment.”

I pulled my attention back to my crumbled and discarded notes. What was I missing?

“Do you think the poem is somehow keyed to the user?” asked Lena.

“I thought about that. I searched for permutations of Gerbert d’Aurillac and Sylvester, thinking maybe the letters of his name were the answer, and I’d have to rewrite the poem with my own name. I couldn’t find anything.”

“It’s a shame you don’t want a lover who’s smarter than you.”

“What?” I stared at her. Her expression was unreadable.

“I’m what my lovers make me, remember? If you fantasized about being with a super-genius, I might be able to see something you’d missed.” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “It’s all right. Being with you and with Nidhi, this is the smartest I’ve ever been, and I’m grateful for that.”

I rubbed my eyes. “I’m sorry. You deserve more.”

“I know.” This time her smile was genuine. “We all have limitations, and you can’t help your insecurities.”

“I’m not—”

She laughed. “I’m satisfied with who I am and what I have. At least for the moment.”

“What about the future?”

“You mean after you and Nidhi get old and gray and wrinkly and die peacefully in your sleep at the age of a hundred and eleven? I plan to find a kind, brilliant, passionate Michelle Rodriguez lookalike and live a life of shameless, hedonistic luxury.”

“Good to know you’ve thought this through.”

She shifted Smudge to her other shoulder and leaned back in her chair. “Just thinking about Rodriguez in that
Resident Evil
film . . .” She shivered. “If you’re not careful, I might have to physically drag you away from those books.”

“If you could find the answers in this thing, I’d take you right here.”

“On the table?” she asked playfully. “Gutenberg wouldn’t be happy if anything happened to his antique book.”

“Fine, we could move to the couch.”

She walked over and studied the poem. For a moment I thought she had been setting me up, that she was about to point out some pattern I had missed. Instead, she pursed her lips and shook her head. “Sorry. I guess I’ll have to somehow make it through the day without your manly touch. Alas and woe.”

“Laying it on a little thick, eh?”

She grinned. “Just trying to cope with my disappointment. The pain may force me to seek solace in the arms of another woman.”

I didn’t respond right away.

“I’m sorry,” said Lena. “That wasn’t—”

“It’s all right.” I wasn’t sure I would ever be one hundred percent comfortable with my girlfriend having a girlfriend of her own, but they say with time you can adjust to anything. Nidhi had described us as family, and in a way, she was right. I certainly spent more time with the two of them than I did my brother or my parents, and the things we had seen and survived created a powerful sense of connection. This might not be the family I had imagined building when I was younger, but when had the universe ever listened to my plans?

Nidhi and I would never be in love with one another. On the other hand, she was a friend and a good person, and I had gotten used to her being a part of my life.

“Tell you what.” Lena circled around behind me and kissed my ear. “You solve this thing, and then we’ll celebrate together.”

The erotic tingles racing down my neck were squashed a second later when Smudge decided Lena had bent down for
his convenience, allowing him to jump from her shoulder to the top of my head. Spider feet tickling my scalp turned out to be a powerful mood-killer. I yelped and tried not to make any sudden moves that might cost me my hair.