Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) Read Online Free Page A

as if you were waiting for me to notice something, and I had to blink away tears and control my breathing before I did. In the earth at your feet, right in front of me, you’d scratched a crude outline of the mountain, complete with the double peak: Ararat and Little Ararat. But the top of the main triangle was open, and a single curled line rose from it. The symbol of the Seraphim.
    “What does it mean, D? That they’re right? That you’re one of them now? I don’t understand. All I want to do is bring you back.”
    You drew a circle on the ground, around the outline of the mountain.
    “What’s that?” Rosko said. “The earth?”
    You didn’t say. Your only response was to reach down with your splayed fingers and rub the image away.

    Mack was standing forty or fifty feet away, on a rock at the edge of the riverbank. He turned in a slow arc, with one hand up to shade his eyes. In the other hand he had a small military-green compass.
    “Where are we?” Rosko asked.
    “I was right. This is the river Aras. We’re still in Turkey, but that”—he pointed to the other bank, a hundred meters away—“is Armenia.”
    “This is the border?”
    “Yes.” He pointed to the northeast, where a tower was visible on a ridge. “See that? Khor Virap. It’s a monastery. Come on.”
    I hate water—have I ever mentioned that? Just in case, I’ll mention it again: I hate water. I hate it so much that I never learned to swim. Even when we’d found a place where the Aras was only fifty yards wide, I had to endure the humiliation of it being impossible to hide the fact that I was scared out of my wits. The river was shallow enough to wade, mostly, and there was a gravel bar in the middle, but Mack had to help us over one by one: Rosko because of his injuries, you because it seemed you might at any moment sit down in the current and let it carry you away, and me because I was rigid with terror. The lines of current in the water looked like alligators to me; they always do.
    When we emerged on the other side, with my heart rate back below 120, a thin veil of ash reached us. We found ourselves in vineyards that had already turned gray: arriving in Armenia was like walking into a crumbling black-and-white photograph. We reached a dirt road and followed it north, up a shallow slope that rose above the vineyards. Soon we saw the river again, below us, and a shadowy outline of the mountain.
    You stopped, as if to catch your breath. “Come on,” I said, taking your arm. “We need to keep going.” But you resisted, turned, and that was when you looked me in the eye for the first time. It was like you were trying to remember something, or put a difficult idea into words.
    “Tell me what happened up there,” I said. “Describe it. Talk to me, Daniel Calder.”
    You said nothing—but it wasn’t that you looked like a sleepwalker; you didn’t have that creepily empty, classic Mystery stare. You looked intensely preoccupied, like someone trying to solve a difficult puzzle under time pressure—or like someone who just received news too bad to take in. You turned back to the mountain again and raised one arm, as if you were about to point to it. But the gesture was odder than that. You held your palm up flat, as if pressed against an invisible pane, and spread your fingers wide, grasping at something you couldn’t reach.
    When you spoke, that first time after the eruption, the accent was your own, but not the pattern of intonation. Not the pitch either, which was higher than usual, more feminine. And every word seemed to cost you struggle, effort:
    “Kor-QET-si—”
    “Kor-QET-si, dol-ETH-mor, uk—”
    “Kor-QET-si, dol-ETH-mor, uk-WAI-jen, voh-DJE-mun.”
    There were tears in your eyes. Tears in mine too, because you’d taken me in one minute from thinking you were a Mystery to thinking that perhaps, if possible, it was worse than that.
    Who were you? What mind, what consciousness, was in there, behind those familiar