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  Contents

  Episode 1: Bubbles of Earth

  Max Gladstone

  Episode 2: Faces of the Beast

  Margaret Dunlap

  Episode 3: Hard Bargain

  Andrea Phillips

  Episode 4: All in a Day’s Work

  Brian Francis Slattery

  Episode 5: Time Capsule

  Mur Lafferty

  Episode 6: Oracle Bones

  Max Gladstone

  Episode 7: The Cracks in the World

  Margaret Dunlap

  Episode 8: Making Amends

  Mur Lafferty

  Episode 9: Homecoming

  Brian Francis Slattery

  Episode 10: Into the Woods

  Andrea Phillips

  Episode 11: Crossing Over

  Margaret Dunlap

  Episode 12: Broken Vessels

  Brian Francis Slattery

  Episode 13: Live in London

  Max Gladstone

  Up Next on Serial Box

  Writer Team

  Bookburners Season 3 Omnibus Copyright © 2018 text by Serial Box Publishing, LLC.

  All Rights Reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part, in any audio, electronic, mechanical, physical, or recording format. Originally published in the United States of America: 2017.

  For additional information and permission requests, write to the publisher at Serial Box Publishing 222 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY, 10038.

  Serial Box™, Serial Box Publishing™, and Join the Plot™ are trademarks of Serial Box Publishing, LLC.

  ISBN: 978-1-68210-186-5

  This literary work is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, incidents, and events are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Written by: Max Gladstone, Margaret Dunlap, Mur Lafferty, Brian Francis Slattery, Andrea Phillips, and Amal El-Mohtar

  Cover Illustration by: Jeffrey Veregge

  Art Director: Charles Orr

  Lead Writer: Max Gladstone

  Editor: Marco Palmieri

  Executive Producer: Julian Yap

  Executive Producer Molly Barton

  Bookburners original concept by Max Gladstone and Julian Yap

  Bookburners

  Season 3, Episode 1

  Bubbles of Earth

  Max Gladstone

  1.

  Sal Brooks watched monsters dance on the wall.

  She recognized the shapes of bulls and deer and antelope, though the beasts on the walls had different names. These were ancient creatures, gone now, or diminished, like elves in those Hobbit books. You never saw aurochs any more. That thing with the branching brain-cell horns, like a reindeer drawn by someone on a bad trip, was apparently a Megaloceros, which Liam claimed meant big horns. Sal felt that being unable to think of a better name for a monster reindeer than big horns suggested there was something wrong with the scientific imagination. She could not deny, though, that the horns were big.

  The creatures circled the cave, huge and vital. Red horses pranced; a white bull squared off against a herd of smaller cattle. A man with a bird’s head hefted a spear before a shaggy bison. Long-gone artists had woven the rock’s colors and striations into their work. Ruddy iron stains framed the earth, and paler limestone the sky.

  The tour guide spoke French, which Sal had come to accept, this being France. Since he wasn’t ordering coffee or talking about pain au chocolat, she was lost, but she might as well make up her own translation. “Thousands of years before Christ, before Rome and Egypt and, like, Gladiator and Kull the Conqueror and all that other stuff your kid brother used to geek out over, early humans descended into this cave with brushes they made themselves from bits of actual horse, with paints mixed from dirt and berries, and, in the middle of what was no doubt a gross, hard, short life, they made all this, down in the bowels of the Earth. And you think this space is claustrophobic now? Imagine what it would have been like without lights. Imagine what it would have been like not knowing what waited deeper in these caves, or what used them when you weren’t around.”

  Liam, beside her, at least confined his disgust to a whisper. “Milton Keynes prehistory, is what this is.”

  “Shhh. I’m listening.”

  “You don’t speak French.”

  “This guy does a good spooky voice.”

  “And so,” her imaginary translation continued, as the pock-faced tour guide reached for a light switch set beside the cave door, “we must not look upon the paintings of Lascaux only with the eyes of our, um, our normal eyes—” Sal would be the first to admit her melodramatic speechifying needed a lot of work. Have to work on that if I intend to keep at this whole world-saving thing. “—but with the eyes of our minds and hearts. To understand the genius of these long-dead artists, we must see them in their intended light.”

  The tour guide flipped the switch, and the world went dark.

  “Oh, come off—”

  She shushed Liam. “Don’t ruin this.”

  In the dark, from the tour guide’s direction, Sal heard the unmistakable sound of someone failing to operate the safety wheel on a Bic lighter, followed by a curse, a few sparks that did not relieve the velvet dark, and a second, more muffled curse. Liam chuckled; she ignored him and waited. Other tourists breathed around her. She could feel them without touching them. Their bodies radiated warmth. Ten thousand years, twenty thousand, before, they would have clustered like this in winter, against the dark and cold. They would have breathed the same air.

  The flame took.

  Sal had turned away to save her night vision. She and Liam stood with their backs to the fire, surrounded by sparks in other tourists’ eyes, and on the walls by shadows that were almost gods. Between the flickering lighter flame and the rock wall striations, the beasts moved. She had thought they danced before, but that was only a trick, a suggestion of movement. In firelight they lived. The aurochs drew breath. The Megaloceros shook its heavy horns. She felt herself with another body, shaggy, ancient, leather-clad and hungry and full of strength, the root and backbone of a world.

  “It’s only a model,” Liam said, and she elbowed him in the ribs.

  • • •

  “I’m just telling the truth,” he was still protesting two hours later, as they wandered through the museum zoo. Two kids ran up to the pony enclosure and plastered their faces against the fence. The clunk of their colliding skulls spooked the ponies, not to mention Sal. Their parents didn’t seem to mind. The kids laughed.

  “You don’t have to be such a tool about it.”

  “My point, and I don’t see why this does not bother you as much as it does me, is that it’s silly to pretend you’re seeing something magical when you’re not. There are real Lascaux caves, not far, let’s see, thataway.” He pointed dramatically, and two passing college girls executed a noticeable head-twist to follow the muscles working under his T-shirt. “That cave wasn’t even a real cave! It was a bloody concrete bunker!”

  “They don’t let people in the real cave anymore.” Sal opened the brochure, and guided them back toward the museum. A cow mooed behind a fence, and she thought it lacked a bit, compared to the aurochs in the cave. “They let people into the real thing for twenty years, and they breathed so much all the paint was about to fall off the walls from the CO2. And before you ask, we can’t just pull some Vatican favors to get into the real cave system. There was some sort of mold infection back around the millennium. They don’t even let scientists down there these days.”

  “I can search Wikipedia as well as the next man, thank you.” The museum doors closed out the lowing cows behind them. “If not better. A
nd my point is not that they should let us into the real caves, I understand the whole preserve-the-priceless-artifacts routine. I just think it’s absurd for us to pretend a concrete bunker, for the love of Christ, is the real thing.”

  “It’s an exact replica.”

  “Some things,” he said, “you cannot replicate. Not even on Star Trek.”

  “What?” That earned her a sidelong glare from Liam, skeptical, suspicious: Was she playing ignorant to poke fun at him, or did she really not know what he was talking about? Sal liked this game. If the rest of Team Three were going to be insufferable nerds all the time, she might as well get some fun out of it.

  “Never mind. If we leave now, my point is, we still have time to register for the vineyard marathon tomorrow. Bordeaux is only about an hour’s drive that way.”

  “Just because you—” She glanced around, but no one was close enough to hear except for a few Paleolithic mannequins clustered by the safety of their diorama fire. “Just because you’re no longer worried you might be possessed by a demon, you’re not obligated to get as drunk as possible at every opportunity.”

  “Not every opportunity, no. But I feel I owe it to myself to take advantage of particularly appealing ones.” He stretched his hands over his head. “Too much boozing would interfere with the gym routine, at any rate. But have you ever heard of such an ideal arrangement? On the one hand, a twenty-some-odd-mile run, and on the other, a glass of wine at every vineyard you pass. Tell me that doesn’t sound fun.”

  Sal thought about wine hangovers, and thought about the one time her college roommate goaded her into a half marathon, and thought about both of these at once. “We’re here to investigate.”

  “Look, I understand your fetish—”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Did you really have to use that word?”

  “—for data-driven policing, it’s an expression, dammit, and trust me I share your desire to leave the Vatican far behind for a few days, but we’ve done what we came to do. There’s nothing wrong in Lascaux. So we might as well enjoy our furlough for a good run and an egregious hangover, and chalk this one up as a false positive.”

  “You were the one who set up the flags.”

  “And they were the right flags, and this did look like a good lead! The discovery of a new cave complex scores points for ancient and mysterious and artwork, plus the territory is within our jurisdiction, and if this was a false positive, as we both agreed seemed likely before we even ran this trip up the auld flagpole, we haven’t set the Vatican’s travel budget back much.”

  She sat on the rail next to the Paleolithic family. A plastic mother suckling her plastic baby looked up at Sal with an expression of holy dread. That seemed fair. “We’ve only been here a few hours. I want to be sure nothing’s wrong before we leave.”

  “There’s no shame in finding nothing.” He settled beside her. “Surely you didn’t stop a crime on every patrol, back when you were a cop. We might not agree with Cardinal Fox on much, but if our new lord and master has anything to recommend him, it’s his insistent harping on operational readiness. You don’t need to find something bad for this to have been a good idea. And so long as we’ve come out here on vacation to test it, we may as well enjoy ourselves on the way home.” He held out his hand.

  She accepted, and found, for the first time since their short-lived, ill-founded, and mutually embarrassing relationship breathed its last two years before, that she could take some friendly comfort in his touch. Even if he had been a dick about the fake cave. “You know,” she said, “you really have been different, since Belfast.”

  “So say we all.” He crooked a smile, which usually meant he’d made a joke she didn’t get.

  Sal was about to ask him to explain the reference when she heard a woman scream.

  They jumped to their feet, and ran toward the cry.

  • • •

  Sparks whirled within a crystal orb at the heart of the Vatican’s Black Archives. Archivist Asanti circled the Orb’s mechanical cradle, taking notes, adjusting knobs and valves, and occasionally referring to one of the seven open reference volumes propped on nearby music stands. The eighth stand held the score of Mahler’s “Resurrection”—she hummed the alto line as she worked.

  The Archives lay empty around her. They were often empty these days, her assistants having been winnowed or reassigned, and most of the team out on patrol. She did not mind the silence, or the workload. She’d let herself grow soft, ordering people around last year. Lifting piles of books kept the body strong, and a strong body made for a strong mind.

  Another advantage of her newfound solitude: She could hear people coming.

  “What do you want, Arturo?”

  The footsteps behind her hesitated. “I tried to call, but you didn’t pick up.”

  “I’m busy.” She flipped two pages of one book, three pages of another, and frowned back at the Orb. “Doing more with less is the order of the day. I didn’t realize how dependent I had become on Frances’s work unraveling the secrets of the Orb.”

  “I thought she had made a full recovery.”

  “That depends on what you term ‘recovery.’ Having your legs magically transformed to scaly tentacles does not tend to be something one heals from. Mentally and physically, she’s as well as can be expected. However, as you may have noticed,” she pointed without looking to the winding helical iron stair that descended from the roof of the Archives’ dome, and to the sundry other stairs leading up and down, “the Black Archives are hardly the most handicap-accessible space in the Vatican. Cardinal Fox assures me a lift will be installed soon. How he plans to do this without compromising his beloved operational security, I do not know.” She turned a page on the Mahler. “What do you want?”

  Menchú looked up. He wasn’t looking at God, and the Black Archives possessed one of the few ceilings in the Vatican no one had thought to cover with paintings of naked men. Asanti found the glyph she wanted on the third codex, and adjusted a lever on the machinery around the Orb. Sparks began to resolve in a single quadrant of the crystal. She followed his gaze to the LED clock, set at thirty-six hours, hanging over their heads. There were four panels, so one could be seen regardless of an onlooker’s position in the Archives.

  “I’m worried about you,” the priest said.

  “I’m doing my job. No one has bothered me or interfered with my new, limited responsibilities since the trial.” She spun a dial clockwise and the sparks dimmed; counter-clockwise, brighter. Brighter still, yes, good, until a thin stream of acrid smoke issued from the machine, and she walked the dial back to a more stable setting. “Which is better than I had hoped. You have no cause for concern.”

  The Orb’s light painted Menchú’s face in ghostly hues, and the clock added a trace of blood. Asanti did not much like the resultant painting. “We haven’t talked in weeks.”

  “Nonsense. We talk every day.”

  “About the job,” he said. “About procedures. About the Orb. But we’re friends, aren’t we?”

  Asanti kept silent.

  “Asanti. I know you’re still angry.”

  Really. Did he.

  She had saved the world, after a fashion; they all had, more decidedly than usual, and that salvation had been accomplished due to their mastery of magic, their Church-judged objectionable habit of viewing the supernatural as a field of inquiry rather than, what, a terrifying slick otherness best consigned to the most secure cells one could construct. And, the world having been saved, the Society for which they worked, which had appointed them to do precisely this sort of world-saving, arrested her. Which had been an enormous surprise to Menchú and the rest of their merry team, but well within Asanti’s own projections. The Society needed a scapegoat. It prosecuted her, threatened her with imprisonment and death, precisely as she’d expected. The Society hoped she would back down, but she did not. By sentencing her, the conservative faction would have doomed itself, giving Society radicals a martyr around whom to rally. But
Menchú acted in a way she did not foresee. He saved her life.

  And now they had a clock over their heads, and cameras in the corners of the room—ostensibly to protect against magical incursion. But magic fogged cameras and slipped off digital records. No, the cameras had been posted to watch her.

  Good for them.

  Still angry? Anger did not cover the half of it.

  She wished Menchú had not raised the question. But now it would look strange if she did not answer—and the last thing she could afford, now, was to look strange.

  She ceased tinkering with the Orb, and turned back to the priest she’d worked beside for more than a quarter century.

  “Arturo,” she began, not knowing what she would say next.

  Thank God—and secret Vatican archives were the place for that sort of language if anywhere was—the Orb chose that moment to resolve. The light blinded. Alarms rang throughout the Archives and, thanks to Cardinal Fox’s coordination memo, in the offices of Team Two and Team One as well. The clockwork printer shuddered into action, drums rolling paper tape through jabbing inked needles. Asanti tore the tape and read the coordinates. She tried to remain impassive.

  “Where?”

  “Lascaux,” she said. “France. The caves, probably.”

  “Sal and Liam are there already,” Menchú said. “Testing their warning system.”

  “It seems they succeeded,” Asanti said. “You’d best get moving.”

  Overhead, the clock began to tick down. Thirty-five hours, fifty-nine minutes, and counting.

  If Arturo Menchú had been any other man, he would have cursed. “That’s not supposed to start until we’re in position.”

  “But Sal and Liam are in position,” Asanti said.

  “It’s not enough time.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  “Thirty-six hours and Team One runs in with guns blazing, regardless of how close we are to solving the problem. Not even a consultation first. We want to keep our work secret—which means keeping Team One out of the field as much as possible. Handling things slowly. Not strapping a time bomb to every mission.” He never flushed when he was quietly angry, but when he started a rant, oh yes. Masterful to behold—even if he stopped himself before he reached full dudgeon. “I’ve said all this before.”