Page 98 of Dead Beat

Darlington and Dawes hauled her over the side as she coughed and sputtered. She hit the floor with an ungraceful thump. When she managed to stop gasping, she looked around.

They were all sitting on the floor of the armory, even Turner, as if their legs had given out. For a long moment, they just stared at each other.

“We were there,” Dawes said in wonder. “We were with them.”

“Fuck!” Alex tried to get to her feet and had to sit back down as a wave of nausea engulfed her. “Huilca. How long were we … in that?”

Turner used the doorjamb to pull himself up and called down the stairs. “Tripp?”

“Yeah?”

“We all good?”

Dawes was looking at her watch. “I don’t think we lost any time at all?”

“He’s still writing,” Tripp called from below. “You want me to do something?”

“Just sit tight. I’ll be down in a minute.” Turner rubbed a hand over his face and braced himself against the wall. “We have to go back. We can find a way to reach them, to try to stop them. They’re already having doubts.”

“I’m not sure that’s possible,” said Dawes. “We don’t know if Alex’s power lets us do anything more than observe.”

“We have to try.”

Darlington shook his head. “Even if we could, it won’t matter.”

“What are you talking about?” Turner insisted. “We can stop the descent. We can stop them from bargaining with Golgarot.”

Alex had started to shiver. She was soaked and still in her bra and underwear. “I’ve read enough sci-fi to know that’s a bad idea.”

“Even if we could somehow do it, even if we stopped Kittscher’s crew, it won’t fix anything.” Darlington’s voice was grim, almost angry. “You heard what he said about the donors. Harkness, Sterling, Henry Sloane Coffin, who knows how many other alumni of the societies. They didn’t go to the trouble of raising Harkness Tower and building Sterling Library, of infiltrating these projects and carving shadow structures into Yale to let them sit idle. They’ll just put the journey off for a year and find a new crop of willing fools.”

“But if they understood the danger—”

“They did understand.” Darlington pushed to his feet. He gripped the side of the crucible, trying to steady himself. “They understood and they didn’t care. Did you see the inscriptions on those beams?”

Alex couldn’t remember all of them. “Purity, Generosity…”

“No, the years: 1492 and 1620. Columbus arrives in America and the landing at Plymouth Rock. Dates of conquest. Kittscher called the room neutral territory. It was built for the pilgrims, and those dates were chosen deliberately because the donors saw them as pioneers, pushing their way beyond all known frontiers to a new world, seeking plunder.”

“We knew they were cocky,” Alex said. “That isn’t—”

“It’s not just arrogance,” he cried. “It’s madness.” Darlington crossed the room and snatched up the blueprints. “Don’t you see it? What the donors wanted wasn’t just knowledge. They wanted power. You heard what Kittscher said: If we bag our quarry. This isn’t a fail-safe. This is a cage. Harkness Tower. The quadrangle. They were built to hold a demon.”

Dawes looked horrified. “They wanted the pilgrims to bring back a demon?”

If we manage this miracle, then we’ll have changed Yale and changed the world. That was why Reiter was asking about what came after the descent. He knew it was only the beginning. And now Hec’s fears made so much more sense. Soldier, your hour draws closer.

“You can’t be serious,” said Turner. “No one is that stupid.”

Alex wasn’t so sure. Maybe no single person was that reckless, but get people together in a group, nodding along, backing each other up? Anything was possible.

Darlington tossed the plans back on the table. “This was always their goal. The power of the societies is directly tied to the nexuses. Without that access to the demonic, what are they?”

“A bunch of losers in fancy robes,” Alex murmured. The sad state of St. Elmo was a testimony to that.

“Those bone chimes we’ve been using to track demons were made to trace magical power in New Haven. They were always searching for it, trying to understand it. They had no idea what created a nexus, and that meant their access to real magic was limited. But remember Kittscher’s arguments in the Daemonologie: All magic is demonic. If they could pull a demon out of hell, they’d have a direct line to pure, raw power.”

“No more limits,” Alex said. It was the same reason Alban Reed and Charlie Girard were coming after her.