Rogue Oracle (26 page)

Irina’s mouth turned down. “Duty. I’m a stalker.”

“I read about those,” Tara said slowly. “You take radiation readings around the Exclusion Zone and record them.”

“Yes. Not that I think that it makes any difference to anyone. I report on containment, on the disintegration of structures, on any deformed animals I see.” Irina shook her head. “It’s very solitary work.”

Tara’s eyes roved over Irina’s shelves, at the photographs arranged on the wall. Most were black and white. One was a wedding picture, showing a younger Irina with a handsome young man in a military uniform. Others were photographs of the same young man in his uniform, standing before the Soviet flag. “You weren’t always alone.”

Irina followed her gaze. “No. That’s my husband, Pavel. He and I used to live here, in this house, together, before the accident.” She poked the potatoes. “He was a firefighter. One of the liquidators sent in to clean up after the accident. The radiation killed him within weeks. He turned black as a husk, shriveled away. Just like the men who fought the fire on the roof of the building, and the men who swam beneath the reactor to shut off the valves, keep the melted fuel and radiation from contaminating the groundwater. They were heroes, and the radiation took them.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. “I did my best to try and save him, tried to draw the radiation out with the eggs. I rolled them over his body, day and night. When I cracked them open, the yolks were black as oil. But no oracle magick could help him. He was too far gone.

“I knew that it was coming. But no one would listen to me. None of the party bosses, none of the military men. I saw it in the eggs, saw there was something dark and terrible coming. I stood outside of the building and screamed at the men to stop their experiments. But no one listened to me, to the egg witch.” Her hand holding the spatula stilled. “They arrested me, took me away. I failed to stop it.”

Tara’s heart ached for the woman, for the guilt she must carry with her. “Why stay here, then? Does the Pythia ask this of you?”

“Because it’s my duty.” Irina’s chin lifted. “I am the woman who watches to make sure that the dragon sleeps. I’m proud to do it, and … it is a kind of penance, for my failure. It is the last small thing that I can do.”

Irina scraped the potatoes onto dishes. “It is a different mentality here, than in the West, I think. We have a desire here to be heroes, to make sacrifices. It’s a kind of fatalism, I think, that runs counter to the selfish individualism I see in many Westerners.” She handed one of the dishes to Tara. “It is a desire and a privilege to serve humanity. You know what that means, to be an oracle in the service of Delphi’s Daughters.”

Tara didn’t answer, just stabbed her fork into the fried potatoes. When she chewed the bite, she expected it to taste like the poison it had leached from the contaminated ground. Instead, it tasted like a potato, ordinary and buttery.

“Sometimes, it’s difficult not to question the ones we serve,” Tara said, mildly.

Irina cracked a sad smile. “Pavel said that, too. But he still went to fight the fire.”

“A
RE WE JUST PUPPETS
, H
ARRY
? O
R ARE WE INVISIBLE
heroes, like the firefighters and the liquidators?”

Tara lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling beams in Irina’s house. Harry sat on the floor, one of Irina’s maps of the Exclusion Zone spread out before him. He looked up at her with surprise. “What brought that on?”

“Talking with Irina. Thinking about Delphi’s Daughters. Thinking about the things that both you and I have lost, serving the government.” Unconsciously, her fingers scraped the scars on her arm. “The innocence Cassie’s lost, serving Delphi’s Daughters. I guess my cynicism tends to get the best of me. When I see someone like Irina unselfishly giving herself to a cause no one remembers … I feel sort of ashamed. Selfish.”

Harry leaned back against the side of the bed. “I think you’ve given a hell of a lot in the service of man. You nearly gave your life to stop the Gardener. That’s more than the vast majority of people would ever contemplate.”

Tara stroked the edge of a scar. “And one of the things I’ve been trying to learn is not to sacrifice my whole life to him. He hurt me, yes. But I don’t want that to control my life.”

“And he shouldn’t.” Harry shook his head. “I’ve been trying to find that balance for myself, too. How much do I give to the job … and how much do I hold back for myself?” He reached up and took her hand. “There’s no easy answer. The fact that we struggle with it more than Irina does, doesn’t make us selfish.”

“I don’t know. I just wonder if there are some people, like Delphi’s Daughters, who don’t have another life, who have surrendered it to the larger pattern. And I don’t know if I want to surrender that, to the Pythia or the government.”

Harry looked up at her. “You know we could quit and run off into the sunset together.” He was smiling, but Tara wondered if he meant it.

Tara’s heart quickened. “But what about Cassie, and the cat and the dog …”

“With Cassie and the cat and the dog.”

“Tempting. But do you think we’d get over the guilt of not properly serving our various masters?”

“Probably not. But that’s just who we are. The whole hero gig. Somebody’s gotta do it. Whether or not anyone else cares or remembers.”

Tara sighed. “Maybe.” She was nervous about the hero gig unfolding tomorrow, about what they might find in the Exclusion Zone, about confronting the Chimera. And she was worried about Cassie, who was heroically avoiding the Pythia back home.

Tara leaned over and dug into her bag for her cards. She shuffled them quietly and thought of Cassie. She plucked one card from the deck and regarded it thoughtfully.

The Page of Cups depicted a young woman with her back to the sea. She was holding a chalice from which a fish leapt. Her expression was one of delighted surprise. Tara smiled at it. Cassie was healing in her own way, making an emotional recovery Tara was certain would bring its own fair share of surprises.

Tara turned her attention to tomorrow’s task: finding the Chimera. The cards fluttered in her hands, and she thought at the deck:
What do I need to know?

She drew three cards and laid them out on the bedspread. The first one, the Magician, showed a man in a violet cloak, reaching toward the sky with a glowing wand. The card was reversed. A lemniscate, an infinity symbol, glowed above his head. Tara let her finger linger on the card, considering. The Magician usually represented the act of creation, mastery over the four elements. Reversed, it suggested mental illness, disaster, and an inability to tame natural forces. Her gaze was caught on the glowing wand and lemniscate, and she thought of radiation. This indicated to her that she should not expect the Chimera to behave in an entirely rational way.

The second card was the Hierophant, showing a man in papal robes, seated on a throne. This was a card of duty, of servitude. Tara thought about Irina and her service to a silent goal, and Tara’s own confusion about her own service.

The third card gave her pause. The Hanged Man showed a man dangling by his foot on a wire suspended between two trees. The man gazed serenely out into space, as if he had surrendered. Tara frowned. This was a card of sacrifice. Something precious was going to be sacrificed in the confrontation with the Chimera. This, with the omen of Irina’s egg, suggested that it could be bloody.

“What do you see?” Harry watched her as she tucked the cards beneath her pillow.

Tara shook her head. “The Chimera’s not a rational man, at least, not anymore.”

“I can’t imagine having experienced this place and still being rational. That’s not a surprise.”

Tara remained silent. She stretched out on the bed with her head on the pillow. Harry climbed into bed behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist. “What else?”

“We’ve got to do our duty, to stop him. But it’s going to cost us.”

Harry rested the top of his chin on her head. “Hey, we’re heroes. No less than the liquidators and the stalkers. We’ll get it done.”

Tara bit her lip. She hoped that the sacrifice would be worth it.

T
ARA DIDN’T DREAM OF THE
H
IEROPHANT OR THE MAGICIAN
. Instead, she dreamed of the Hanged Man.

Tara crept through the brittle black forest of her dreams, searching for the man with the glowing rods. Her lion kept pace, pausing to sniff the ground. The sun poured down through the blackened trees in luminous shafts, suspending bits of ash that clung to Tara’s dress and crept into her lungs. It stained the lion’s fur black, as if he’d been walking in oil.

The sun sparkled against something metallic overhead, and Tara stopped in her tracks. She looked up to see a figure suspended on a wire, dangling like a toy on a string. She recognized the armor. It was Harry, the Knight of Pentacles, swinging by his ankle in the stillness.

Tara picked up her skirts and drew her sword to rush toward him. She had to cut him down. But the lion blocked her path, growling.

“Let me through,” Tara insisted, shoving at his flank. “I have to help Harry.”

The lion glowered at her, roared.

“I have to help him.” She had no choice in it. It was the duty of her heart. She couldn’t just leave him, no matter how her intuition snarled.

She succeeded in sidestepping the lion, making a break for the tree under which Harry was suspended …

In a flurry of blackened leaves, something snagged and lashed around her foot. It yanked her up off the ground. Tara dropped her sword, hand scrabbling in the leaves, but the rope suspending her snapped up into the tree canopy. She shielded her head with her arms as the brittle branches snapped against her. The upward motion stopped with a jerk, and she was left, dangling, suspended by her foot in the tree branches. Just like Harry. Trapped.

Blood rushed to her head, and she felt her pulse thundering in her ears. Tara twisted, trying to reach her ankle to release herself. She only succeeded in turning herself in a dizzying spin that slowed only when she reached her arms out to her sides and concentrated on nothing but breathing.

She looked down. The lion gazed up at her, growled, tail lashing in the black leaves. He’d told her so. She’d failed to listen to him, and now Tara and Harry were both trapped.

And he was not alone. Tara’s breath caught in her throat when she saw the engineer of the trap standing at the edge of the thicket: the World, holding a precious, glowing bundle of rods, glared at her with a bottomless expression of malice, like a spider who had just discovered something new trapped in his web.

Chapter Twenty

Y
OU CAN
wear that, if it makes you feel better.”

A chiding smile played at the corner of Irina’s mouth as she watched Harry and Tara gather their gear. They’d donned the crisp white Tyvek suits Tara had gotten from the archivist, and clunky boots and gloves from Steve’s military surplus store. Respirators dangled around their necks, and Harry had insisted that Tara clip the dosimeter onto her belt, while he held the GPS device and the gun from the mugger. Harry had duct-taped together the seams of the suits and gloves. They looked like low-budget astronauts in a middle-school science fiction play.

In contrast, Irina wore a stained canvas suit and a pair of black boots. Tara noticed she kept these items on the front porch, not in the house. A pair of welder’s gloves was tucked into her belt, but she wore no respirator. Just a hat and a dust mask. She carried a Soviet-era dosimeter with a strap that went over her shoulder and a clipboard. A pencil was perched behind her ear.

“You don’t worry about the radiation?” Harry asked.

Irina shrugged. “I’ll roll eggs over you when we get back, if you want. That removes the worst of it.”

Harry stared at her, incredulous.

“She’s an ovamancer,” Tara supplied.

“Oh, well, that explains everything,” snapped Harry. Tara knew he was distrustful of things he couldn’t see: intuition, radiation, love. And this case had too many of these elements for him to suffer gracefully.

“They used to tell us that vodka and milk would neutralize the radiation,” Irina said. “I don’t think I believe that, but it doesn’t hurt to try.”

“I believe I’ll be ready for that drink.” Harry shook his head and followed Irina to the same car they’d taken from the train station.

The car turned over, bumped down the vacant roads. They passed no other cars, but Tara saw birds flitting between the trees of the lush green forest intersecting the fields. “The animals … have they shown any signs of radiation poisoning?”

“Not as much now as they did. When Pripyat was evacuated, soldiers came and shot as many of the house pets and cattle as they could find. They missed a great deal. My cats are descendents of those.”

From the window, Tara could see a long chain-link fence, topped by barbed wire, extending through a field. Birds perched on top of the wire. Harry struggled to roll up the window, but had no success. The sky was gray and overcast, threatening rain. Tara wondered if the windshield wipers on the car worked.

Irina continued. “Birds are a good sign. After the accident, the sparrows were the first to die. They’d fall out of the sky like stones. But they came back, slowly. You’ll see … nature has reclaimed the land. It’s still poison, but it doesn’t belong to man any longer.”

Irina pulled off the road before a gate. A sign beside the gate in Cyrillic detailed a warning that was almost two feet long. A radiation symbol was prominently displayed at the top of the sign.

“Welcome to the Exclusion Zone,” Irina said. She hopped out of the car to open the gate.

“Don’t you have guards or something here?” Harry asked.

“The main checkpoints do, to deter looters,” Irina said. “But there wasn’t the interest or funding to keep them at all the gates. Besides, everything worth stealing is already gone.”

That was nearly incomprehensible to Tara. In what kind of world would someone willingly take contaminated property? In a very desperate one, she decided.

They continued down the road, into an abandoned city where trees grew in between blocky administration and apartment buildings. “This is Pripyat,” Irina explained. “Most of the Chernobyl workers lived here. They were told they would be able to return, and most left everything behind, expecting to reclaim it later.”

A rusting Ferris wheel stood in an empty lot, beside bumper cars that had been wrapped in fencing wire. “What’s that?” Harry asked.

“Pripyat was preparing for the May Day festival. They were forced to leave this behind.”

Irina stopped the car before a low, flat building that might have been a school. The skeleton of a swing set still remained beside it. “I need to take some readings. Feel free to walk around. But don’t pick up anything on the ground. And don’t touch the moss, especially. It seems to hold the radiation like a sponge.”

Tara slipped her respirator on and piled out of the car behind Harry. While Irina made some notations on her clipboard, Tara listened to the dosimeter at her waist click. She walked up to the side of the building and peered in, mindful to avoid the toxic moss on the pavement. Inside, she could see desks, moldering books, and even pieces of chalk along the blackboard. It was as if everyday life had immediately been annihilated.

“When were you evacuated?” Tara asked.

“Not for several days after the accident,” Irina said, distractedly, as she filled out her forms. “I don’t think anyone, not even the party bosses, really knew what we were dealing with. At least, I’d like to believe that.”

They piled back into the car and continued down the road, past a field full of rusting cars and Soviet helicopters. “This is a storage yard for contaminated vehicles. They’ve been pretty well stripped for parts,” Irina explained. “I occasionally find something there to fix the car, but not often. I don’t like the rats much.”

Tara’s skin crawled, imagining Irina scavenging the junkyard for parts.

Harry asked, “Where are the highest radiation levels you’ve recorded? We think our suspect is looking to dig up some old reactor fuel.”

Irina frowned, considering. “Radiation is a capricious thing. One house on a street may be within normal parameters, but the one next door might be hot. I’ve often wondered if something as simple as the color of paint might have something to do with it. You may be looking a long time, if you want to examine all the hot spots. But … the most consistently high levels I’ve found are around the Sarcophagus itself. You might start there and fan out.”

Irina drove them another two kilometers to the plant itself. Tara couldn’t help but feel a sense of foreboding as they approached. She stopped at a gate on the perimeter … This would be one of the official, manned gates that Irina had described. It was on a paved road and had a little guard house with a red-and-white painted stop arm.

“I will ask them if they’ve seen anyone.” Irina pulled the car up behind the guard house. She leaned out of the car and rapped on the window, but no one answered. Her brows drew together. “There should be someone here.”

Tara and Harry climbed out and circled around the guard house to the unlocked door. A dead guard sprawled on the floor, wedged between the bottom of his chair and the console.

Irina sucked in her breath and swore in Russian. Tara checked for a pulse, but found none. The man was stiff and cold.

“How long are their shifts?”

“Twelve hours. He’s been on since last night.” Irina stepped over the guard to the radio apparatus on the small countertop. The aging radio had been cracked open and the microphone ripped out of the housing. “The radio’s been destroyed.”

“Our Chimera’s close,” Harry muttered. Tara saw that his gun was drawn, that he’d wrapped his clumsy gloved fingers over it. “He must have brought a car.”

“If it’s here, we’ll find it.”

They piled back into the car and idled down the main street of the industrial complex. Irina guided the car down rows of blocky buildings studded with glass and concrete. Some of them had to be administrative and supply buildings, Tara guessed. Some still had electricity: one had a digital sign on the side that displayed the time and radiation levels. They passed one that displayed eighty-one millionths of a roentgen per hour. Tara stifled a shudder. Normal background radiation was supposed to be between six and twelve millionths.

Irina wound down to the reactor complex, behind the peeling red and white paint of a smokestack. “We’re coming up on unit four … the one that failed. Until recently, the others had still been running.”

“Unbelievable,” Harry muttered behind his respirator.

Unit four was unmistakable. The Sarcophagus covered part of the white building in a black box, holding in the radioactive debris from the reactor. If the spent fuel from the other reactors was being stored somewhere, this would be a good place to put it, behind this formidable lead-lined casket.

And the Chimera apparently thought so, too. A truck was parked in front of it. Irina parked several meters away behind the edge of a crumbling building to let Harry and Tara out.

“He’s here. Can you go get more guards?” Harry asked.

Irina nodded. “I’ll have to get to the next town for a radio, but I will bring them.” She glanced at the Sarcophagus. “Are you sure—?”

“Yes.”

“Be careful.” Irina handed them a heavy flashlight through the open window.

The small car buzzed away, leaving Harry and Tara in the shadow of the Sarcophagus. A stiff breeze rattled pebbles across the pavement and bent grasses and warped pine trees. Harry approached the truck, gun drawn. Tara clutched the flashlight like a club as they advanced on it.

The truck was the kind used to transport cattle, with a ramp and slats to keep the cattle from pitching over the sides of the bed. Inside the bed were a dozen metal drums. Some were open, and some were closed. As Tara approached, the alarm on her dosimeter wailed. She stifled it, turning off the volume. A glance told her the background radiation was almost a full roentgen. It vibrated against her hip furiously, like a hornet caught in a jar. Tara could feel the vibration crawling along her skin underneath her suit, the prickle of radiation that felt like standing too close to a stereo speaker.

Harry peered into the cab. “Nobody home.”

“It’s hot. We can’t let him take the truck out of here.”

Harry slid into the driver’s seat. No keys in the ignition. He reached under the dashboard and ripped the wires out from under it. “It’s not going anywhere, now.”

The back window of the truck shattered in a hail of glass. Instinctively, Tara hit the ground, recoiling when she discovered that it was covered in contaminated moss. When she lifted her head, she saw a figure advancing upon the truck with a rifle at his shoulder. Her breath caught in her throat.

The Chimera was not the figure of the World she’d seen in her dreams. Instead, he was an angry man dressed in dusty black pants, black T-shirt, and a miner’s helmet with a light that flashed in the sunshine. A radiation burn blistered over his skin, turning his angular countenance red and furious.

Another shot slammed into the pickup, and Tara ducked behind the truck’s bulk. She gripped the flashlight, crawling around the corner of the truck. She didn’t think the Chimera had seen her yet. Perhaps she could circle around …

Harry returned fire from the back of the truck. Unfazed, the Chimera advanced. Tara heard Harry swear about cheap ammunition, heard him slam the gun against the dash. The gun had jammed. And the Chimera was coming.

G
ALEN ADVANCED ON HIS QUARRY, TRAPPED IN THE TRUCK CAB
like a bug in a jar. He shouted at the man to come out, banged on the flank of the truck with the butt of the rifle. A man in a white plastic suit tumbled out of the cab, hurled a gun at him, and charged.

Galen was tackled into the metallic-tasting moss. The rifle was trapped between the two men, and Galen struggled to re-establish control of the weapon. The gun fired near the truck, deflating one of the tires in a hiss.

No.
He would not allow this interloper to interfere with his plans. For an instant, Galen wondered who this intruder was. He was too overdressed in protective gear to be a stalker, but there would be no one else here …

Galen’s bare hand clawed at the man’s face, knocking the respirator off. His palm made contact with the man’s face, a man whom he recognized from Veriss’s memories: Harry Li. His hot palm seared into Li’s face, feeling the burning of memory there. For an instant, he could hear Li’s voice in his head, that churning mass of fear and determination and frustration. He heard Li howling outside him, but heard his voice and memory beginning to leak into his head, like a water tap turned on low. He flashed on a memory of a beautiful, dark-haired woman tangled in sheets and scars.

That memory was clubbed out of him by a blow to the back of his head. Galen reeled back, and was struck over and over by something heavy that slammed his head again and again into the moss-covered ground.

He ripped away from Li, lashed out at the new figure in white who was clubbing the hell out of him with a flashlight. He knocked that peculiarly solid ghost to the ground, against the howl of Li’s voice in his ear.

He clambered to his feet and ran, ran to the Sarcophagus.

Overhead, the sky split open, and it began to rain.

“H
ARRY
.”

Tara cradled Harry’s head in her lap, stroking the side of his face where a handprint-shaped burn bloomed. Rain speckled his cheek. The Chimera had only had the chance to touch Harry for a second before she clubbed him. But the touch had seemed to affect Harry like acid. She shook him, and rainwater sluiced off his suit in runnels to the ground.

“Harry, please talk to me.”