"Let's go," Richard said. "No one here. Maybe they're out to lunch?"
The men darted across the floor of the hangar and hid amid the separated and labeled wreckage of the airliner. They could still smell the fire that had consumed the fuselage, and though much of it had been reconstructed on a framework of steel supports, the floor was still strewn with unidentified parts. Like body parts, Richard thought. Bits they can see, many more pieces they cant identify. The plane came apart like the bodies inside, and people only have themselves to blame. If they d opened their minds — if they'd given the little spirits credit for their talents — the gremlins would have never turned on humanity.
"Over here," Gal said. Richard followed him to the tangled mess of one of the massive engines. It had been gutted by an explosion, and its mechanical guts hung out as if seeking escape. Gal traced his finger across the blackened surface of the metal, sniffed the soot, shook his head, and moved on. "Closer," he said. "Getting closer." He repeated the process here and there, and Richard joined in, touching and sniffing, looking for that trace of something that was not mechanical or electrical, something that had once had life and thought and emotion.
They found it on the outside of a smashed door.
The door was so twisted by fire that it had not yet been reaffixed to the body of the plane. Molded around its exposed handle, cauterized hard by the conflagration, was a layer of greenish material. Neither brother even had to touch it to know what it was. Flesh, the fat of a spirit, the trace of a gremlin.
"There it is," Richard said, and, as ever, he was filled with wonder at what they had found. Every search started with belief and little more. And every search ended with discovery. They were doing something right, and not for the first time he wondered who, or what, might be steering them.
"You take it, I'll send it," Gal said.
Richard used a penknife to take a slice of the material. When he cut it, it bled.
Gal sketched a sigil in the soot on the hangar floor. He knelt, closed his eyes, started to mutter the invocation that would open the Memory to him, and he dropped the gremlin flesh onto the sigil. The world around him receded to little more than an echo. The sigil grew warm, as if flaring with the flame of the crash once again, and the gremlin flesh sizzled and popped as it faded out of this world and into another. It passed into Memory and, as always, Gal had an instant to watch it go. He felt the depth of that place and the emptiness, the loss and the rage, and he fell back crying into the arms of his brother.
"There," Richard said, rocking his brother back and forth. He never got used to the tears. "Come on ... you're back."
Someone ran toward them across the hangar, shouting words the brothers could not understand, and Richard smiled at the irony. If he answered the query, his response would also be beyond understanding.
What are you doing here? the guard was probably saying.
Saving the world, Richard would say.
Saving the world.
* * *
Tsilivi, Zakynthos, Greece — 1997
LIZ SHERMAN WAS HOT. Her friends at the BPRD sometimes joked that she should be used to the heat — sometimes, when they thought that such joking would not hurt her too much — and she would smile and shrug and say that being used to it didn't mean she had to like it.
She never thought they were very funny.
No, Liz liked it cool, misty, raining. She liked it grim. She preferred it when the weather didn't seem to be doing its utmost to remind her of who she was. Her dreams did enough of that.