“He’s gone,” Tiadba said. Now wasn’t the time to tell them what she had seen.

“We should stay here until he comes to get us,” Perf said.

“He won’t come for us anymore. We’re on our own.”

“Where exactly are we?” Nico asked, trying to overcome sudden hiccups. He tugged against his friends’

gripping hands and pushed up, trying to see out of the hollow.

“We made it,” Perf said, astonished. “We’re still alive.”

“We can’t stop,” Tiadba said. “We should travel as far as we can before we rest.”

A pleasant low tone, languid and musical, sounded in their ears.

Herza and Frinna touched their helmets. “The beacon,” Herza said. “We’re on course.”

“Time to go,” Frinna said, transformed, and Macht echoed her, their enthusiasm surging, paralysis broken—too quickly.

“What if something’s looking for us?” Perf asked.

“Something will always be ‘looking for us,’” Khren said, with a buzz of sarcasm. “Let’s move, like she says. We should take a peek first, of course.”

“That’s what I was trying to do,” Nico said.

They could all feel it. They were in the Chaos, in the wild at last, and to Tiadba, the sudden excitement and anticipation were almost as frightening as Pahtun’s destruction. They were much too eager. But they knew that whatever came next, they were where they belonged.

TEN ZEROS

CHAPTER 67

The Green Warehouse

Daniel and Glaucous stood silent and watchful by the warehouse door, too tired to speak. Bidewell had brought the new visitors inside, then left them with Jack and went off, he said, to make preparations.

“Things will be getting worse sooner rather than later.”

Glaucous dropped to the wooden bench beside the door, face swollen with fatigue, piggish eyes bleary, paying neither of the younger men a whit of attention, as if for now they were beneath notice. Daniel lowered his head and bent over, fighting nausea.

“I don’t know you,” Jack said to Daniel. “I doknow you,” he blurted at the squat, gnomish man. “If you try anything, I swear…I’ll killyou.”

Glaucous stared up at Jack. “Well spoken, young master,” he said. “You should know that I killed the pair that hunted the young lady. We all have our mixes of good and bad.”

“How did you get out of the van?” Jack asked. “Where’s the fat woman?”

Glaucous waggled his hand, demonstrating something flying off into the air.

“I wouldn’t worry about him,” Daniel said, pushing up again.

“What about you?” Jack asked.

Glaucous smiled. “So very tuned, so very sharp.”

Jack worked to keep his temper. “I don’t know why the old man let either of you in.”

“You assume Bidewell’s brought you here to protect you—to keep you safe from such as me. He hasn’t told you his story, I take it?” Glaucous asked.

“You shouldn’t talk when he’s not here.”

“Ah, we are in your charge,” Glaucous mused, then dropped his gaze to the floor.

“How many of us are here?” Daniel asked. “Shifters, I mean. I’m thinking three, me included.”

Jack shook his head, unwilling to give up information. “Where did you get that stone?”

Daniel winced. “I don’t remember. Do you?”

Jack glared.

“From your family, right?” Daniel asked. “My family’s gone. Not dead—just gone, forgotten, even before this—what’s happening outside.”

“A bad place,” Glaucous muttered. “And no escape.”

“That’s what happens to us,” Daniel said. “We get wiped out of the histories.”

Ginny had come through the aisles and stood in the shadows, watching them. “You’re not in my dreams,” she said to Daniel. She pointed to Glaucous. “Who’s this?”

“My hunter,” Jack said.

Bidewell returned with Agazutta and Miriam. The two women inspected the newcomers with expectation and dread. Ellen and Farrah joined them, and Ellen took Ginny’s arm. The circle stood in silence—except for Glaucous, whose breath came in labored, grinding snores, though he was not asleep.

“We have work,” Bidewell said. “For the moment, there needs to be a truce. Mr. Glaucous, are you fit?”

Glaucous pushed to his feet with a whistling sigh. He rubbed his nose vigorously. “A dray horse most of my days.”

“I remember you more as a bull terrier, sent down rat holes,” Bidewell said.

“Do you still offer a workman’s reward for a workman’s labor? I remember you were fond of drink.”

Bidewell turned to see that all the ladies had gathered and arranged themselves around Ginny, who stood trembling in their midst.

Jack found it difficult to restrain himself. “Where’s your fat partner?” he asked again. Glaucous smiled obsequiously. “I will miss her.”

Bidewell startled them by clapping his hands. “Enough. The outside will soon become more demanding,”

he said. “We have no choice but to place our strongest defenses where they will do the most good.”

Glaucous tipped open a box flap and fingered the corner of a book. “I do like a good read.”

Bidewell flared, “Caution, Mr. Glaucous. These are not mere children. Tease at your peril.” He motioned to the stacks. “We must move boxes and crates to the outer walls.”

“Your servant, sir,” Glaucous said, and inclined his head.

Jack approached Bidewell as the others headed off through the stacks. Daniel tossed him an enigmatic, measuring glance. Ginny was quickly hustled away by the book club ladies and did not object; they were off to form their own work detail, Ellen explained.

“I don’t like any of this,” Jack said to Bidewell when they were alone.

“Have you noticed, we are not the ones making the arrangements?” Bidewell asked. The cacophony outside—like boulders grinding in a giant mixer—had grown louder. Every few hours, following a sharp crackling and slam like falling masonry, deep bell tones would ring, vibrating curtains of dust from the rafters.

Bidewell walked along the aisles, through the warehouse, saw that his people were sleeping—fitfully. He listened to the low voices of Glaucous and Iremonk in the storage room where they had pitched their cots, set apart for now, and with good reason. Jack could hardly stand the sight of, either. Bidewell mostly held back his own opinions.

In truth, though, he was puzzled. There was something unusual about Glaucous, very different from his experience of other hunters and servants of the Chalk Princess.

The voices of the two refugees softened and finally stopped, and Bidewell returned to his desk and the warmth of the iron stove, wide-awake. He truly slept perhaps once a month, to avoid the wretched things that passed for dreams. For Bidewell, a man who never forgot anything, who never shed his brushed connections with all possible histories, dreams were like sick spells or fits of unproductive coughing. The past, all of his pasts, refused to be expelled.

It was apparent that none of his assembled people—his chosen family—could understand why he had allowed Glaucous into the warehouse. Daniel Patrick Iremonk was more of a conundrum, a fate-shifter, after all, with his own sum-runner; but still unlike Ginny or Jack. Bidewell felt the presence even before he saw the man, if man he still was. The hunter appeared a few steps away, wrapped in convenient shadows. “Getting uglier,” Glaucous said, his voice almost lost in a rumble that rose through the floor. “Out there, I mean. You should get out and see. Quite an experience for such as us. Consequences and conclusions.”

“Make no accusations. You are barely tolerated,” Bidewell said. “I was never a cager of birds.”

“Yet I’ve completed your set, Conan. He might never have come here without my guidance.”

“It seems you need him more than the reverse.”

“No doubt. He has never been caught, never come close to being caught—and until now, never attracted the attention of her hunters. But it seems Mr. Iremonk is made all the more crucial by his exceptions.”