California Bones (17 page)

Daniel laughed. “Cassie?”

“I have second thoughts every minute I hang around you guys. But I’m good to go.”

“Okay,” Daniel said. “Let’s Jacques Cousteau this shit.”

*   *   *

Swimming was glorious. Daniel knifed through the water, thirty feet down to the bottom of the ruined pump works. Beneath dolphin-smooth skin, a layer of fat kept him warm, and the only thing dragging him down was the pack looped around his waist, containing his gear and clothes. He could barely see through the dark and murk, even with a miner’s lamp strapped to his head, but he could detect the location and movements of his crew, as if the contraction of their muscles sent electrical signals to some new part of his brain. He hadn’t changed shape, but the essences of sea creatures were strong enough to make him feel as though he had.

They reached a monstrous nest of pipes and valves. Twisted rebar reached from a pile of debris like the tendrils of some great, frozen anemone. A fur of algae coated everything. The crew spread out, searching for the portal Emma said was down here. Jo flashed her headlamp twice, and they swam over to see what she’d discovered: a circular grate the size of a manhole in the terminating wall.

Moth and Cassandra unpacked their handsaws, impregnated with firedrake-scale dust. They went at the grate, the screech of their saws bounding off the walls. After several minutes, they cut through the last bar and let the grate rest in the muck. Daniel took the lead, swimming into the gloom. If Emma’s map was accurate, the tunnel ran twenty yards before ending at the bottom of the cistern.

Pressure squeezed his chest. Troubling aches built up in his legs. He checked his watch. They’d been underwater almost sixteen minutes, and his lungs were remembering they liked air. In a little while, they’d be screaming reminders at him.

He sensed movement ahead. Emma had said to expect carp or catfish. And she’d cautioned that down here in the dark, with traces of osteomantic residue at the bottom, the fish may come in odd forms.

Daniel turned to signal a warning with his headlamp when blades came down in front of his face.

His first thought was he’d run into a bear trap big enough to take off his head. Scrambling to get away, he caught sight of teeth in the narrow beam of his light, incisors the size of pizza slices, and empty eye sockets in a skull three feet across. What the hell was this? Some kind of big, fucked-up, osteomantic coelacanth?

He pulled his leg back, not quick enough. The fish had him. Its teeth tore into his calf and shin, all the way to bone. It thrashed, jerking him around like a dog with a chew toy. The water turned red. With a dull crack, his knee popped out of its socket, and the air rushed out of his lungs in an explosion of bubbles and a gargled scream. He reached for his headlamp, hoping to signal his crew to turn and swim away, but the lamp wasn’t there.

His only hope was to kraken-shock the fish, and his fingers were already tingling when sense took hold through the pain. He remembered he was underwater. Releasing electricity might stop the fish, but conducted through water, it would also electrocute his friends.

The fish jerked its head, teeth still grinding down on Daniel’s leg. His vision tunneled, and he ran down his options, and the only one that promised any hope of success was to stop struggling. Maybe while the fish was busy eating him, his friends could escape. This was a dismal plan and it probably wouldn’t work, because his friends would never leave him. They would stay with him underwater, even if it meant drowning. They loved him.

Something sliced through the water near his face, cutting a trail of bubbles. Moth’s arm came down, swinging a length of rebar. Moth struck the side of the fish’s skull and it cracked like a dinner plate. Another blow, and shards of bone separated and fell amid the storm of blood and bubbles. Half the fish’s upper jaw and a dozen teeth were still embedded in Daniel’s leg, but he was free.

He fluttered away, and the fish opted not to pursue. Instead, it turned toward bigger prey: Moth.

Daniel kicked to reverse course and intercept the fish before it could get to him, but he was too sluggish. Fast as a spear from a gun, the fish fell upon Moth. Again and again Moth hammered the fish’s teeth with his rebar, shattering several of them with each blow, but the fish was undeterred. It lifted its head upward, raising its remaining teeth high like the knives of a dozen assassins.

The fish brought its jaw down, and six-inch teeth sank into Moth’s neck and back. He trailed blood like a cape as he slowly sank.

Bursts of orange light fired all around Daniel, and he braced for an attack from a new source, but the light came from calcium flares lit by Cassie and the others. Cassie had already assembled her cable gun and was taking aim. She fired, and a hook on the end of steel cable whizzed over Daniel’s head to strike the fish in the spine. Half a dozen vertebrae cracked apart into nuggets, but even damaged, the fish zeroed in on her.

With awkward flicks of its tail, it moved slower now, but it still gained on Cassie as she swam away. She dropped the cable-reel gun and scrabbled in her pack for something to help her, but she had nothing useful against the fish.

Jo and Emma converged on her, trying to pull her from the fish’s path, or distract the fish, but they were getting tangled up with each other, like a giant bait ball.

Daniel held perfectly still. He closed his eyes and examined his cells. He looked even deeper down, to the cells that were in the process of reverting to their customary, human configurations. He was an osteomancer. His father had altered him and trained him to be a vessel for magic. Osteomancy wasn’t just a family of drugs that gave him new abilities for a short period of time. Osteomancy was his fuel, his building material, a force that he could master.

The panlong was a water dragon, sleek and smooth and graceful. Kolowisi, from fossils excavated from the bottom of the Rio Grande, was a creature of the black depths, honored by the Zuni Pueblo. The essence of bagil, smuggled from the Northern Kingdom, lent the speed and ferocity of the great crocodilian creature.

Daniel had blended these elements for underwater swimming. Now, he drew upon their full power.

He surged forward with a speed that should not have been possible with the anatomical structure of his legs. His teeth were still the small, pebbly things evolved to chew soft meat and plants. His fingers were still delicate instruments evolved for tool use. But osteomancy transcended his physical form. He reached the fish and grabbed hold of its spine. He twisted, and its bones shattered with the sound of snapping wood boards. The fish turned toward him, opened its great mouth wide, and Daniel thrust his hands into the its eye sockets and ripped its skull apart as if tearing a loaf of bread in half.

In just a few seconds, he’d broken the fish into a puzzle of bone fragments that sank into the murk.

As the last of the sea creature magic faded, his leg thundered with pain. He opened his mouth in a silent scream, and his starved lungs threatened to burst through his rib cage.

But in the glow of the calcium flares, he saw the faces of his crew.

They were okay.

Things would be okay.

The job was still going okay.

*   *   *

He broke the surface in a stone-vaulted cistern, heaving for breath. Dripping water echoed through the vast space of pillars and shadows.

Moth dragged him onto a floor of ice-cold stones.

“You’re hurt,” Emma said.

“What gave it away?” Daniel gasped. “Was it all the blood?”

“Your face is the color of cottage cheese.” She looked down her nose at the rivulets of blood streaming from his leg and
tsk
ed. “Well. What are we to do about this?”

“Move,” Cassandra said, shoving Emma aside. Daniel could tell by the look on her face that it was bad.

“Everyone else okay? Moth?”

Moth peeled off his shirt. He held it up, displaying huge puncture holes. “Lost a lot of blood and tore a couple of nerves. Five minutes and I’ll be fine.”

“Daniel,” Cassandra said, and then she stopped talking.

“Can you see muscle?”

“I can see bone.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Okay, not a lot of bone.” She unpacked her medical kit.

“Just bandages,” Daniel said. “No hydra.”

“You need the hydra.”

Hydra regenerative could stop bleeding and speed tissue regeneration, and even though Daniel had cooked every last ounce of it from the bones in Otis’s stores, it wasn’t enough to fill a perfume sample bottle.

“Save it for later, in case we need it,” he said. “Just bandages.”

Ignoring him, Cassandra daubed a few drops of the white oil onto a gauze pad. “You can give me orders as soon as I’m no longer looking at your exposed tibia. Until then, shut up.”

Daniel surrendered, because he knew she was right. In the water, drawing on the magic of the sea creatures, he could swim. On land, he was crippled.

He bit back screams as she wound bandages around his calf. After a few minutes, the pain receded to a cool tingling. The hydra regen coursed through Daniel’s blood, filling him with warmth and well-being. He accepted Cassandra’s hand and got to his feet. Gingerly, he put a little weight on his leg. He felt like he could kick a soccer ball to scraps.

“So the competence-porn part of this job has clearly come to an end,” he said. “Which means we’re officially underway. Next phase. Jo, make your face.”

They all stripped out of their wetsuits and back into dry clothes. Jo changed into the midnight-blue uniform of a catacombs guard. Daniel held a mirror for her as she molded her face into a new configuration. Pressing her hands against her cheeks, she flattened and widened them. She hooked two fingers into her right eye socket and grunted softly as she pulled it an eighth of an inch to the right, and again as she pulled her left eye in the other direction. She spread her front teeth apart to form a gap. While she reshaped her face, she expanded her belly and broadened her shoulders and lengthened her arm and leg bones. Her hair shortened and curled. Her skin flushed and then paled, finally settling to a freckled, olive tone. Wiping sweat from her forehead, she donned a baseball cap with guard insignia, and she was someone else.

“Break a leg, kid,” Daniel said, kissing her stubbled cheek.

“Thought you already did that.”

They rounded the walkway bordering the cistern and hunkered in the shadows against the wall. On the other side of an arch, a guard paced back and forth. She was a small, slight woman, but Daniel could smell short-faced bear sweating from her pores. In terms of strength and ferocity, she was a monster.

Jo gave Daniel a thumbs-up, removed a handkerchief from her pocket, and crossed the archway, into the chamber beyond.

Daniel chewed his lip. He would only be able to hear and smell what happened next.

“Sir?” the guard said, startled.

Jo blew her nose into the handkerchief. “How’s the watch, Tomasi?” She made her voice thick and gravelly. Emma had been able to get a photo of the guard captain Jo was impersonating, but not a voice recording. The common-cold trick was one of Jo’s standbys.

“Nothing to report, sir,” Tomasi said.

A
harrumph
from Jo. “You heard about the situation with your relief?”

“No, sir.”

“He failed his inspection. He won’t be relieving you.”

“I can stand his watch, sir. It’s no problem.” Tomasi sounded so jaunty and happy. Anything for Team Hierarch.

“I don’t think you’re understanding me. He won’t be making tomorrow night’s shift, either. Or the night after that. He won’t be making his shift for a long, long time. He failed his inspection.”

“Oh.”

“Oh?”

“I mean … Oh,
sir
.”

“That’s marginally better. I’ve had to shuffle personnel all over the catacombs. I need you in Annex B, third level.”

“Isn’t that a restroom?”

“I’m sorry, is that beneath you? I think you’ll find many guards would be happy to stand watch at a restroom. I think your relief would be happy to stand watch there. I think he’d be happy if he ever stood again.”

Daniel could practically hear Tomasi’s lips moving as she worked it out.

“Of course … I didn’t mean … When do I report, sir?”

“Immediately. I’ll cover your watch here.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

A few echoing footsteps as Tomasi headed off.

“Tomasi!”

“Sir?”

“Your keys. You won’t be needing them in Annex B.”

The jingling of metal. “Should I sign them over?”

“I’ll take care of the key roster. Report to your watch. And while you’re up there, you may want to review procedures and protocols before
your
inspection.”

“Yes, sir. I will, sir. Thank you, sir.”

A tense silence, and then footsteps again as Tomasi retreated with haste.

Daniel waited a full minute in the shadows with the others until Jo whistled the all-clear.

She beamed as Daniel hugged her.

*   *   *

The morgue was constructed of stone, mortar, and human bone. Steel cabinets, with drawers large enough to contain bodies, were built into the walls. There were hundreds of them.

“Welcome to one of our kingdom’s dirty little secrets,” Emma said, her breath fogging the air.

This was where dead magic users were warehoused. Not the osteomancers, or even high-level consumers, but just average users with trace amounts of osteomancy in their systems. Some were homeless, scooped up off the streets. Others died in clinics and hospitals. Some were dug out of their graves. From here, they were transferred to the catacombs’ leeching workshops, and once all remaining osteomancy was reclaimed, the bodies were incinerated.

Emma changed from soft-tread boots into heels and threw on a long lab coat. Meanwhile, Jo changed outfits again, this time into the plain gray coveralls of a catacombs worker. She gave no thought to modesty. “An actor doesn’t fear exposure,” was one of her favorite sayings. Daniel suspected she simply enjoyed exhibitionism.

More modest than Jo, Moth used a blanket for cover as he stripped out of his clothes and lay back naked on a gurney. The metal joints creaked under his weight.