Rogue Oracle Read online

  The woman’s head cocked to the side, and her light brown hair licked her cheek. A pair of safety goggles was perched on top of her head. “You’re bringing it back?”

  This was not how the game was played.

  “Yeah.” Tara held it out to her. “It’s yours.”

  “What did you do to it?” Suspicion turned the corner of her mouth.

  “Nothing. I swear.”

  “Does it still work?”

  “Yeah.”

  Fast as a cobra striking, the woman snatched the coffeepot from Tara’s hands and held it to her chest. “Um. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  The woman examined the coffeepot for tampering, then looked back at Tara over the white plastic brim. “Is this a bribe? What do you really want?”

  “I could use some help,” Tara admitted. “Research help.”

  The woman’s shoulders relaxed a bit. “Oh. What on?”

  “Chernobyl. I’m looking for information about survivors, about radiation exposure and health effects.” Tara looked at the white suit the woman was wearing. “Looks like you’re the expert.”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m just an archivist. Cleaning some fragile silver nitrate photograph plates. Can’t get dust on them. And they do have the tendency to corrode, if not stored properly.” She paused awkwardly. “But I think I can help you, anyway.”

  “Thanks.” Tara gingerly extended her hand in truce. “By the way, I’m Tara.”

  The woman grasped her hand with her pink glove. “Jenny. Let me get this gear stowed away, and I’ll see what I can dig up for you.”

  Tara followed Jenny down the corridor to a back room with a locked keycard entry. Jenny swiped her badge to let them into a brightly lit space covered with workbenches and computer terminals. Under a flame hood and Plexiglass box, Jenny’s silver nitrate plates glistened, smelling sharply of chemicals as they dried.

  Jenny set the coffeemaker down on a table. She snapped off her gloves and unzipped her protective suit, stepped out of it, and stuffed the gear into a wastebasket. Underneath her suit, she wore a simple T-shirt and jeans—items that wouldn’t require dry cleaning. They made her look very young, like a teenager playing dress up. She perched on a stool, watching Tara, probably guessing that Tara would run off to steal something when her back was turned.

  “EPA has some files on Chernobyl. I know they’ve been over there several times on fact-finding missions.” Jenny hooked her feet in the bottom rungs of the stool and turned to a computer terminal. Her fingers flitted over the keyboard. “Some of them are public record. Some are not.”

  Tara didn’t figure her security clearance would get her very far. “What would it take to get access to those?” She leaned on a workbench, arms crossed.

  Jenny’s mouth turned upward. “You could file a request up your chain of command. It would probably take a few weeks.”

  “What if … what if I brought you a gift?” Tara was feeling out the parameters of the new game; it was like bringing treasure to the dragon, in the hopes the dragon would spill its secrets.

  Jenny gestured to the coffeemaker. “I think that’s an even trade. For now.”

  Tara lifted an eyebrow, wondering what other petty thefts she might need to turn a blind eye to.

  Jenny’s fingers flickered over the keys. “The EPA reports are used often enough that they’ve been digitized. You don’t need the originals, do you? That would take some doing.”

  Tara shook her head. “No. Digital is fine.”

  Jenny slid from the stool. “I can’t let you take any of this stuff with you, so you’ll have to read at the terminal. I’ll ignore any notes you take, though.”

  “Thanks.” Tara slid into the stool and began to scan the files. In her peripheral vision, she saw Jenny fussing with the settings on the overhead vapor hood. She figured the archivist would probably hover around to make sure Tara wouldn’t steal anything. Tara could live with that. She hunched over the terminal and began to read.

  Her knowledge of the accident at Chernobyl was probably comparable to most people in the West: she knew a reactor in Ukraine had exploded, causing serious health and ecological damage. No one had known the true radiation levels at the time. Safety protocols and information from radiation detectors had been disregarded, though the true levels were twenty thousand roentgens per hour, well exceeding the lethal dose of five hundred roentgens. The area around the reactor plant had been cordoned off with a thirty kilometer Exclusion Zone, where no one was permitted to enter. The Exclusion Zone included the nearby city of Pripyat and the reactor buildings, which were not evacuated until more than a day later. But contamination had reached into Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus following the accident, which had been caused by an experimental shutdown of the Chernobyl plant by engineers. Of the four reactors at the Chernobyl site, not all were closed until 1999.

  More than a half-million people had been involved in immediate efforts to stop the spread of contamination. These people, known as “liquidators,” were given very little information about the effects of the radiation. They and firefighters were sent to drop sand and pour concrete on the lava-like reactor fuel still seething at the site, to haul away debris, to put out fires with water, and to seed the skies for rain that would precipitate volatile cesium from the atmosphere, resulting in black rain that poured down on an unevacuated populace. A temporary structure, known as the Sarcophagus, was built over the ruined fourth reactor to assist in containing the radioactive debris. But, in the intervening years since the disaster, the Sarcophagus was crumbling, allowing daylight and radiation to seep through.

  These were facts. But she wanted to experience it. She wanted to see the pictures.

  Pictures taken immediately after the disaster were mostly black and white, grainy in their quality. Tara assumed these pictures had belonged to the Soviets. They were surreal, showing the massive reactor shell ripped apart. Aerial views showed a black hole in the ground that smoked in daylight. Reactor fuel had poured into the foundations of the building, seething hot and unstoppable. It had cooled to a ceramic state, but descriptions indicated that it had flowed like magma. Photographs from space showed a glowing ember in the darkness that was the reactor melting down for days.

  She clicked through photos of broken concrete and foam spraying that had been ineffectual, or had even made things worse. Massive bags of sand and boron had been dropped from the sky to muffle the radiation, but the magma-like mixture of reactor fuel and concrete burned through the reactor floor, threatening another explosion if the mixture reached underground water in a flooded cooling pool. Volunteers entered the ruined reactor to drain the pool, keeping the magma-like fuel from connecting with water beneath the reactor, successfully preventing a second explosion. But the ruined core had to burn itself out. There was nothing stopping a force as fearsome and unnatural as that.

  She flipped through photographs of the Sarcophagus being built, with cranes and hasty welds. Workers described the sensation of the radiation as being like pins and needles on their bare skin. Some of the workers’ and firefighters’ skin turned black days later, and they died of radiation sickness. A morgue photo showed a man burnt to a black husk; Tara couldn’t tell if it was from fire or from the radiation, as she couldn’t read the original caption in Cyrillic.

  With her heart in her mouth, she turned her attention to photographs from the hospitals, asylums, and children’s homes for orphans. Some were children who had been alive at the time of the disaster; others were born after. Her vision blurred as she viewed a photo of a bald girl with thyroid cancer, sitting up in a bed staring out a window with heartbreakingly alert eyes. She knew. She knew what had happened to her. Children with horrific deformities, missing and misshapen limbs, lay on the floor of a children’s home while nurses spoon-fed them. They would never walk. A boy with his brain growing in a pocket of skin outside of his skull was cradled by a nurse in a black-and-white photo. A boy in a wheelchair was captured in a frozen
scream in a photo at the asylum. The American photographer, a worker from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, had included the comment that the boy screamed every moment he was awake for his mother, who had abandoned him.

  Tara pressed her knuckles to her mouth to keep from sobbing. These were the most horrible things she’d ever seen. More horrible than any of the cases she’d worked. Even more terrible than being cut up at the hands of the Gardener. The amount of human suffering was palpable, even through these flat, two-dimensional images.

  She shuddered to imagine how they would invade her dreams. She couldn’t imagine the dreams of the man who’d lived through it. And she didn’t want him to share that dream with anyone else.

  CASSIE’S SLEEP HAD BEEN INTERRUPTED BY TROUBLING dreams. She’d tossed and turned, ejecting Oscar out of bed more than once. Maggie had stuck her cold Labrador nose in her face to check on her, whimpering. She’d finally crept out of her own bed in the early hours of the morning to sleep in Tara’s room. She pulled Tara’s quilt up around her chin and watched the stars revolve around the pole star until they faded at dawn. Only when the stars dimmed did she manage to fall asleep, waking only when the sun was high above the eaves.

  She’d plodded down to the kitchen for coffee, bleary-eyed and barefoot. She wondered at the silence of the house, found a scrawled note in the Pythia’s hand on the counter: Went out for supplies. Be back at dusk.

  Cassie frowned as she plugged in the coffeepot. Hard to tell what supplies the Pythia had gone out for. Could be anything from bullets to bread to begonias. The Pythia was probably pissed at her for not being up bright and early for her next lesson. She swore the Pythia rarely slept; she always seemed to be creeping around with that inscrutably Pythia-like expression on her face.

  She leaned over the kitchen sink to peer out the window, and saw no cars in the gravel driveway.

  Cassie smiled. For the first time, she had the house entirely to herself. No Pythia. No Delphi’s Daughters. Only Oscar, who stared at her suspiciously from the bottom step. He mewed. Cassie was certain that, in his language, he was warning her that curiosity had bumped off more than one of his kind.

  Cassie patted him on the head, climbed back up the stairs to dig around in the secrets of Delphi’s Daughters.

  Like many houses, the farmhouse kept certain public areas open to company: the kitchen and sitting rooms on the first floor held little evidence that the house was a nest for oracles. There were maybe a few too many herbs drying above the sink, and perhaps an abnormally large amount of ashes in the fireplace for summertime. But there was little other sign of magick. Delphi’s Daughters tended to keep their personal magick to themselves.

  Cassie’s footsteps creaked on the steps, and she padded through the upstairs hallway. The farmhouse had six bedrooms, variously occupied by whichever Delphi’s Daughters were in residence at the time. Cassie didn’t know how many total members were in Delphi’s Daughters. Tara said that she didn’t know, either. But she told Cassie that they likely numbered in the hundreds, even thousands.

  Cassie bypassed Tara’s room. There was nothing there that she didn’t already know about. Tara kept her personal possessions to a minimum. Cassie thought that was perhaps on purpose, to keep the Pythia out of her head. Only a photograph of Tara as a child with her mother stood on the dresser. Cassie knew Tara’s mother was dead, that she had been one of Delphi’s Daughters. But Tara had been less obedient than her mother. Tara would understand Cassie’s desire to jiggle the glass doorknobs in the hallway, to investigate the company she found herself in.

  None of the doors were locked. Most rooms were painted soft pastel colors, with rag rugs and quilts piled high on old iron bedsteads. Cassie peered into closed drawers, pawing through sock drawers and medicines arranged on dresser tops. One of Delphi’s Daughters, a botanomancer, was on enough lithium to fell a dinosaur. Interesting. Another had a really impressive set of crystals arranged in a battered silverware box. She knew better than to touch, just let her eyes rove over the shiny surfaces. She admired the handbags one of the women had hanging on a hook. Expensive stuff.

  But these things didn’t interest Cassie nearly as much as the door at the end of the hall, where she knew the Pythia slept. When she slept. Cassie turned the glass door-knob and let herself in, heart hammering at her daring.

  The Pythia’s room wasn’t like the others. The others were temporary abodes, places for women who were passing through on oracle business to sleep for the night. This room, however, was unmistakably the Pythia’s. The walls were painted a deep cinnamon red, and the smell of frankincense and myrrh incense clung to the velvet drapes. Heavy Persian carpets covered the hardwood floors. A four-poster bed took up half the room, veiled in long, sheer violet curtains and gold tassels.

  Cassie emitted a low whistle. It was like something out of Arabian Nights.

  From the doorway, Oscar sat and gave her a disapproving mew. Even he wouldn’t cross the threshold to the Pythia’s realm.

  Cassie’s gaze roved over dozens of glass perfume bottles on the dresser, interspersed with half-melted candles. She headed for the closet, opened the louvered door to peer at the riot of silk costumes bursting from the too-small space. They were beautifully embroidered blouses, full circle skirts, bra-like tops and scarves adorned with bells and coins that jingled when the Pythia walked.

  That, she expected. But the Pythia’s closet held a few surprises. In the back hung two somber black business suits like those in Tara’s closet. Two pairs of handmade Italian shoes. Cassie lifted her eyebrows in amusement. She’d never seen the Pythia in heels. A set of camouflage coveralls, like Cassie would expect to see in a hunting supply catalogue, only tailored for the Pythia’s diminutive height. And what looked like a black flight suit, covered in pockets, but with no military emblem on it. Matching boots were in the back of the closet, tiny compared to Cassie’s feet, but crusted in mud.

  Cassie turned her attention to the Pythia’s dresser. The Pythia’s jewelry box was full of gorgeous gold bracelets, earrings, and necklaces. Cassie opened a locket that showed a black-and-white picture of a woman who strongly resembled the Pythia. She was dressed like Amelia Earhart, in a khaki jumpsuit and scarf. Her mother, perhaps?

  The top two drawers held predictably slinky things that Cassie didn’t want to picture the Pythia wearing, along with bath salts and soaps that smelled like amber. The next one held some disintegrating books written in Arabic. Paging through them, Cassie thought she recognized some of the Arabic names for stars: Al-’Adhara, Al-Firq, Al-Ka’s. But the rest was a puzzle to her. She put them back and opened the last drawer.

  This was where the Pythia kept her weapons. A knife with a jeweled hilt glittered in a tooled leather sheath. Cassie found a ring in a box and wondered at it until it popped open, and she could see a void beneath the stone that might hold poison. A handgun, exactly like the .357 the Pythia had taught her to shoot two days ago, rested in a holster. It was very Wild West, with mother-of-pearl grips and a worn holster. Cassie imagined the Pythia as a cowboy, standing in a dusty street at high noon, and giggled in spite of herself.

  Through the open window, she heard the crunch of gravel. She froze. Shit. The Pythia was back. She slammed the drawer shut and peered out the window.

  That wasn’t the Pythia’s car.

  At first, Cassie thought perhaps it belonged to a new member of the rotating Daughters-in-residence program.

  The nondescript sedan pulled up to the house, and she could hear Maggie barking. The man who stepped out was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, staring at the house with an appraising look that Cassie didn’t like. Instinctively, she knew he didn’t belong here.

  She heard his boots clomping on the porch a floor below her, heard the ring of the doorbell. Instinctively, Cassie reached back into the Pythia’s goodie drawer. With shaking hands, she checked to make sure the gun was loaded, and padded down the hallway. Oscar zoomed into Tara’s room and hid underneath the bed skirt.

 
She waited. From here, she had a clear view down the steps at the kitchen door. Maggie was lunging against the door, barking and snapping.

  The doorbell hadn’t brought a response. Cassie hoped the man would go away. Perhaps he was just lost, or selling something. Either way, she wanted him gone.

  The doorbell stopped ringing, and Cassie blew out her breath … until she heard the thump of his boots on the porch, heard the jiggle of someone trying to get in the kitchen window. Maggie lunged at the kitchen counter, barking.

  Cassie’s fingers whitened on the gun. Maybe she could scare the guy off, keep him out of the house and not have to call the cops. Cassie considered the idea of summoning them and discarded it. The nearest law enforcement was thirty minutes away. They might as well not exist.

  Cassie slipped down the stairs, hearing the creak of her steps and wincing. In a clear voice, she shouted, “Get away. I’m armed.”

  The jiggling at the window paused, died. Cassie’s heart hammered. Good. Maybe that had frightened him away. She waited for minutes, her back pressed to the wall, waiting, but she didn’t hear the engine of his car start back up. She mentally ran through all the first floor windows, didn’t know which were left open and which were shut.

  She jumped and squeaked when she heard the living room window screen crash inward and glass splinter on the floor.

  Cassie clambered down the steps to escape, reached out for the handle of the kitchen door. She fumbled at the lock with shaking hands, conscious of Maggie snapping and growling beside her. From the corner of her eye, she saw the intruder barreling through the sitting room. He kicked Maggie aside with a yelp, sending the dog sliding limp across the hardwood floor, and advanced upon Cassie.

  Fury lit in Cassie’s chest, and she leveled the gun at him, snarling, “Don’t you dare hurt my dog.”

  The intruder didn’t pause, kept storming toward her in the glitter and crunch of ruined glass, like a foreign juggernaut in the safe space of the Pythia’s parlor.