Carrie Vaughn: Discord's Apple

In a strange twist, the team helped with the rescue effort, which included digging out Talon’s counterpart in the Russian version of the Eagle Eyes, the Company of the Gray Bear. In gratitude, Agent Slovsky did more than give them the evidence about the missing spies—he told them the exact location in Siberia where they were being held. Moreover, the team promised to hand over any information they found regarding the terrorists who had perpetrated this act. An event of this magnitude could only bring the rival powers of the world closer together.

All the lessons of history to the contrary. Evie’s idealism astonished her sometimes.

She e-mailed that much of the reworked script to Bruce, who had probably chewed all his pencils to pieces with worrying. While she was online, she opened a Web browser and did a search on prostate cancer. In fairly short order, she learned that the standard treatment for advanced stage prostate cancer was a procedure called an orchiectomy. Medical castration. She didn’t get much further than that before shutting down her machine. She just didn’t want to know. She turned off the lamp on the bedstand and hoped for sleep.

A hard wind blew, rattling the windowpanes. The Eagle Eye storyline turned back and forth in her head—there was always so much more than she could get into a script: thoughts, expression, the little pieces of the characters’ backgrounds that might come into play at certain moments. She wrote novels in her head and grew frustrated that she hadn’t yet found the patience to put a novel to paper.

She couldn’t sleep.

She went to the kitchen to find some tea or a glass of water and passed the doorway to the basement.

When her grandparents lived in the house, the basement had been off-limits. She could play anywhere in the yard, read any of the books—fascinating fairy stories and ancient histories—on the dozens of shelves in the living room, but the basement was for grown-ups. When she was old enough to think about it, she assumed that meant power tools and cleaning solvents. By the time her father moved into the house, she was out of college and never spent more than a weekend at a time there and never took much interest in the basement.

Now she assumed that the prohibition no longer applied.

A bare bulb hanging from the ceiling lit the stairs. The basement was unfinished, framework and heating ducts exposed, a second room blocked off with bare drywall. At the foot of the stairs was a workroom with a rack of tools, a table saw, and a nebulous unfinished woodworking project propped against a set of metal shelves.

In the middle of the drywall at one end of the workroom was a closed door.

Stocking-footed, robe wrapped around her T-shirt and bare legs, she crept down the stairs to that door and opened it.

It was a storage room: shelves crammed with troves of objects, crates stacked as high as the ceiling, boxes piled to create the narrow walkways of a maze through a room whose edges were lost in darkness. The air smelled dusty, with a bite of cold seeping from the cracked concrete floor.

She looked for a light switch or a cord dangling from a ceiling bulb, but couldn’t find anything. Back in the workroom, she retrieved a flashlight, then entered the storage area, feeling like she was spelunking.

She couldn’t see much in the beam of light: the shadows and angles of boxes, tarps draped over a few corners, forming weird lurking shapes. She felt six years old again, on an adventure in her own house simply because she was sneaking around past midnight.

Passing the flashlight beam back and forth, she identified some items: a thick hammer, like a sledgehammer, on a short handle, the wood shiny from use; an old-fashioned broom, brush stalks wrapped around a dark staff; a cup made of chipped clay; a sheepskin folded on a shelf. In the flashlight’s sickly glow, the fleece looked yellow, shiny almost. No dust dulled it, even though it must have lain there for years. She ran her hand over it. It felt soft, fresh, and sent a charge up her arm, a static shock.

All the objects looked archaic and out of place, but none of them looked old. On the next shelf over, she found a musical instrument, strings on a vertical frame. Not a harp, but a lyre. She plucked a string. It gave back a clear tone. She bet it was still in tune. The note seemed to echo. She shivered.

This was a museum. The stuff here must have been worth a fortune. Her grandparents might have gathered such a collection over the course of their lives. But why hadn’t anyone told Evie about it?

A stack of papers rested on the shelf by the door. Hoping it was some kind of inventory, something that might tell her what exactly all this was, she picked up the pages and leafed through them. The handwriting on them belonged to her mother, Emma. These were the loose-leaf pages she made her notes on. Emma Walker had been a travel writer, mostly articles for magazines. It was a hobby she’d maneuvered into a part-time career. Evie supposed she’d learned to write from her, though she’d taken the impulse in an entirely different direction.

Emma had been in Seattle doing research when she died.

The first page was a description of a garden. Evie couldn’t guess where or when; it didn’t have a label. It didn’t matter. The pages held her mother’s voice. Evie put them back on the shelf, where they looked out of place and lonely.

She left the room, closing the door softly, as if an infant slept inside. It was precious, wondrous. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end.

She made tea and sat at the kitchen table with a pen and sheet of paper to write longhand, which she hadn’t done in ages. It helped sometimes, making the words physical. Not much story happened. Mostly, she made lists, character sketches, snippets of description for if, when, she ever got around to writing the novel.

She was asleep with her head on the kitchen table when her father emerged for breakfast in the morning.

“Trouble sleeping?” he said, standing on the other side of the table, amused.

Stretching the kinks out of her back and neck, she rubbed her face. “Yeah. No. I don’t know, I just meant to get some tea.” She didn’t remember falling asleep; her body still felt like it was midnight.

“It was the wind blowing last night. Rattles the whole house. It kept me awake, too.” He didn’t act like it. He was already dressed for the day. He poured a glass of orange juice and drank it while he pulled his coat from the rack by the door.

She wanted to ask him about the storeroom, but realized he was getting ready to go out. “Where are you going?”

“I’ve got a Watch shift this morning.” He was on the local Citizens’ Watch, had been since her mother died. The local police didn’t have enough people to staff the checkpoints and continue their usual workload. Citizens’ Watch took up the slack.

“Are you sure—I mean, are you sure you should still be doing that? I didn’t think you’d still—”

“I’m not dead yet,” he said cheerfully.

“But what if something happens?”

“Nothing’s going to happen.”

“But—”

“Evie, I plan to keep things as normal as possible for as long as I can. I like the Watch. It gets me out. I’ve got everyone in town looking out for me. I’ll be fine.”

This was like when she was in high school, with her parents standing in the kitchen, listing all the reasons she shouldn’t go out after the game, with all the drunks on the road, and her insisting that she’d be fine.

He put the empty glass in the sink. He’d reached the door when he looked back and said, “You want to come along?”

“I should try to get some work done. I don’t want to leave Bruce hanging.”

“I’ll see you after lunch, then.”