The Brightest Fell

by Seanan McGuire

  “We can’t make you believe us!” protested the female.

  “Then I suggest you try very hard,” I said.

  “We’ll need the mandrake,” said the Selkie.

  I picked it up, leaned forward, and dropped it outside the circle. It didn’t have time to hit the ground. The night-haunts swooped down and whisked it away, while the Selkie hung suspended, looking at me.

  “How long do we have?” he asked.

  “October comes at midnight,” I said. “I will return shortly before that deadline. We shall see, then, what doors are to be opened, and which are to remain closed.”

  I disappeared, leaving the flowers burning, leaving the air heavy with night-haunts, and leaving the last material traces of my mother’s life behind.

  NINE

  Elliot jumped when I materialized in his office, his arms flailing as he nearly sent his chair toppling over backward. I watched with interest. People do not fall as often as they once did when faced with my abrupt appearances. Familiarity breeds both contempt and a certain degree of inconvenient wariness.

  “It is done,” I said. “The fire alarms in the cafeteria will no doubt notify us if we need to be concerned.”

  His eyes widened. “The night-haunts came?”

  “They came, and we spoke, and they took the sacrifice I offered them.” I shook my head. “Really, I do not understand why October made such a big deal about the process. They were perfectly civil with me.”

  “April, you don’t have a body. Not the way the night-haunts measure that sort of thing. They can’t punish you for summoning them the way they’d punish someone else, like October, or me. All they can do is get angry.”

  That wasn’t all they could do. They could also refuse to build a new body for my mother’s consciousness. She wasn’t like me, a program that could be installed in any hardware capable of supporting her needs. She understood what she was supposed to be too well. I could spend a hundred years trying to integrate her ashes with a fresh server, and all I would manage to resurrect would be a broken shadow, incapable of understanding what I had done to it, or why.

  No. This was the right way. This was the way that suited the operating system of my mother, the way that seemed most likely to bring her back whole, healthy, and sane.

  “Li Qin was asking for you,” said Elliot.

  I shot him a sharp, wary look. “What did you tell her?”

  “Tell her?” He laughed unsteadily. “That you were working on a private project. Maeve’s teeth, April, did you think I was going to say ‘oh, your adopted daughter is trying to blackmail the night-haunts into helping you resurrect your wife, who we all thought was lost forever, and if they won’t, she’s going to leave everyone else dead to punish them’? I’m pretty sure she would have gone looking for you.”

  “And she would have found me. Li Qin has always been lucky that way.” Lucky, and more than lucky. She can bend probability with an artist’s skill, and while fortune always snaps back on her—always balances itself out—she knows how to make it dance to her desires. Without her, Mother would never have been able to make my integration with the hardware work. Even if Li Qin didn’t know it at the time, she powered my salvation.

  I owed her so much. I owed them both so much. It was past time I started to repay them for everything they had done for me.

  A quick inward glance at the network told me it was almost eleven. Time must have twisted inward on itself while I was in the ritual circle, an unfortunate side effect of using my actual magic, which still believed me to be something green and growing. Dryads thrive on slow magic. It sustains us, allows us to keep our trees—which are more mortal than the flesh of our cousins, who do not age, or grow, or die in the same ways that we do—alive and thriving for far longer than the seasons should deem possible. Dryads are not truly immortal like the Daoine Sidhe or the Tylwyth Teg, because trees must shed their leaves and put forth new fruit to remember what it is to be a part of the forest. But they can live a long, long time.

  I will live far longer, now that I am no longer a part of that slow and subtle process. I wish I could regret that.

  “Are they here?” I pulled my attention out of the network, returning it to Elliot. “October, has she arrived?”

  He nodded. “She and Li Qin are in the basement, along with Toby’s squire.”

  “You should have told me!”

  “You were busy.”

  He was correct—of course he was correct; the night-haunts were not the sort to sit patiently and wait while I took a meeting elsewhere—but I glared at him all the same.

  “What did you tell them?” I demanded.

  “That they couldn’t begin until you got there, and I couldn’t watch,” he said. “It wasn’t a lie. I know if it works, they’ll call me, and if it doesn’t, I don’t want to know until I have to.”

  “I said October was to be locked out until the night-haunts agreed!” My voice was turning shrill, hurting my own ears.

  Elliot looked at me flatly. “I told Li Qin,” he said. “She opened the doors anyway. You’ve got a problem, take it up with your mother. She agreed that nothing would happen until you were there. Honestly, under the circumstances, I feel like that’s all you were going to get. October’s a hero. You were never going to keep her waiting on the stoop.”

  The rules of Faerie are elastic things, capable of bending themselves into incredible configurations before they actually break. Heroes have always been, and will always be, a strain on those rules. They go where they like. They do what they will. They save us, but the damage they do in the process is sometimes the thing we truly crave salvation from.

  “Watch the security feed from the cafeteria,” I commanded. “When the night-haunts return, call me. No matter what I seem to be doing, call me. You have permission to use my security override.”

  I didn’t wait for his reply before vanishing, hurling myself into the code and racing along it to the access port in the basement, half-hidden behind a filing cabinet. I reached for it, crackling like an electrical short in my hurry to make myself manifest.

  Li Qin was standing between two of the covered cots, her hands resting beside the heads of two of the victims—Yui and Barbara, our first and most innocent dead. She was looking at a tall, underfed woman in a leather jacket, whose brown hair was streaked with incongruous gold. As for October . . .

  She looked wearier than she had been the last time I had seen her, something I wouldn’t have believed possible if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Faerie is not easy on heroes. The bones in her face had shifted since then, becoming sharper, less human. She was burning out one side of her blood, becoming something new. I could sympathize with the pain of the process. I, too, had once become something new.

  A tall boy on the verge of becoming a tall man stood behind her. His hair had darkened from the careless dandelion gold of our first meeting, becoming a deeper, stranger shade of bronze, but his eyes were still exceedingly blue, and he still looked comfortable in his own skin. He offered a wan smile when he saw me. I inclined my head in reciprocal acknowledgment.

  Li Qin glanced over her shoulder. Her smile was warmer, if underscored with understandable anxiety. “Hello, sweetheart. Elliot told me you were indisposed.”

  “Elliot also informed you that I did not want this ritual to begin until I was present,” I said sternly. “Why did you refuse to heed him?”

  “Nothing has begun,” she said.

  “The ritual will work best if it starts at midnight,” said October. “Blood magic likes the stupid dramatics.”

  I looked at her. “The ritual may not begin at all,” I said.

  October blinked. Then she scowled, anger rolling across her face like malware. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Li Qin said—”

  “This is not Li Qin’s County,” I said. “This is mine. I have one additional co
mponent to add to the process. If it is not completed in time, I am afraid we will not be able to continue.”

  “April?” asked Li Qin. “Did you find something in my notes that I had overlooked?”

  “Not in your notes,” I said, keeping my attention on October. “The trouble with notes—the trouble with anything in the material world—is that they are only as honest as the people who compose them. You recorded the truth as you knew and understood it. I do not accuse you of lying to me, Mother. But other people have told lies. Other people have obfuscated their data.”

  October opened her mouth to speak. Then she paused. “April,” she said, in a careful tone, “why is there blood on your hands?”

  I can carry things with me when I transit through the network. Sometimes it is a conscious choice, as when I deliver Elliot’s lunch to his office on the days when he doesn’t feel like he can handle seeing anyone. The soda is always flat when I arrive, and batteries are often exhausted, hence my refusal to transit with the upload device . . . but I can do it. Other times, it is automatic. Mother used to clip ribbons in my hair, and I would wear them for days, somehow transmuting them into pure data when I disappeared, then reconstructing them from light and pixels when I came back.

  Mother always said that one day, she would figure out how I did that, and it would allow her to upload anything she wanted into infinite, flawlessly expandable storage. She called it the “Pokémon project,” and she had never had the time to begin. Death came first.

  I was going to fix that. The proof was on my fingers, which were stained red and streaked with ash.

  “I am working on an independent research project,” I said, tucking my hands behind my back. Judging by the expression on October’s face, out of sight was not out of mind. Upon further consideration, I did not care. “The results should be in by midnight. If they do not match my desired outcome, I am afraid I will be unable to approve this ritual.”

  “Not even for Alex?” asked Quentin. He glanced at one of the cots, where a slender, black-haired woman lay unmoving. Terrie was an interesting case, as the victims of Gordan’s upload process went: by day, her body was male, and belonged to her “brother,” Alex. They shared physical space, but not mind or memory, and when the upload device had been inserted into their mutual flesh, it had drained her away, not him. By day, Alex lived. By night, Terrie died. When it happened on company property, she generally tended to wait out the hours of darkness in their shared office. She must have been carried to the basement for the ritual’s sake.

  “Alex’s position is awkward, but not untenable,” I said flatly. “Merrow are bound to the water; Dryads are bound to their trees. Alex is bound to the daylight. His chains are no direr than any other’s.” The fact that Terrie’s consciousness was trapped alongside my mother’s was beside the point. I would have them both, or I would have neither.

  “That’s cold,” said Quentin.

  “It is necessary.”

  October, who had been silent through all of this, frowned and asked, “Who lied to you?”

  I looked at her. She would understand. If anyone would understand, she would, because when Gordan had taken Quentin, she had been willing to risk everything to get him back. She understood what it was to gamble the world for the sake of her family.

  “Gordan,” I said.

  She went very still, and I knew she understood. She had seen the blood on my hands. She could no doubt smell it as well; smell the traces of my mother’s magic lingering there.

  Li Qin—who had not been here when things went wrong, who had heard about it after it was already over, when Elliot had finally tracked down a way to contact the knowe where she had been staying—looked between us, a frown on her face.

  “What aren’t you saying?” she asked. “What in the world could be so important that it would make you refuse to let us bring back these people? They’re your friends, April.”

  “They are my colleagues at best, and my acquaintances at worst,” I replied. “They consider me a software innovation gone too far, and who’s to say they’re wrong? My attempts at independence got them killed.”

  She winced, but didn’t contradict me. That was for the best. Much as I adored my surviving mother, she was ill-equipped to argue with me in matters of guilt. She carried her own burden. I carried enough for both of us.

  Instead, in a small voice, she asked, “What could possibly matter enough for this?”

  “Please do not ask me again,” I said. I felt weary all the way to the core of my code. “Until I have succeeded or failed, I do not wish to tell you.”

  “How is Alex?” asked October abruptly. The question was a little too loud, a little too brassy: she was trying to distract Li Qin. It was a transparent ruse, especially to Quentin, who had watched her magically-enhanced dalliance with Alex from a close, if confused, distance. He grimaced, looking at anything but his knight as his cheeks burned red.

  “Well enough,” said Li Qin. “He never really sleeps anymore—he just dies when the sun goes down and Terri takes control of the body. It’s beginning to wear on him. I think he used to get the benefits you or I would get from dreaming from being his sister’s ride-along, back when they functioned as they were intended to.”

  “Well, hopefully, we can fix that,” said October. “Tell me more about this ritual.”

  Li Qin produced a folder and began explaining its contents, rattling through lists of steps and connections to similar, sympathetic magics. She was talking fast and firmly, like she wanted to sound so convinced of her own correctness that there was no room for a dissenting view. She did not mention the chance that October would sleep for a decade after the deed was done. I did not remind her.

  There was a beep in my ear before Elliot’s voice said, “April, I have movement on the cameras in the cafeteria.”

  “I see,” I said. Turning to the others, I continued, “I am needed elsewhere. I will return. Please do not raise the dead without me.”

  Then I was gone, back into the network, back into the living lightning nothingness of the world where I belonged, moving like thought across the length of the building, until the outlet spit me out into the dim, smoky cavern of the cafeteria, where my piles of dried flowers still smoldered with a green, terrible light. The fire alarms had yet to go off. That was due to the magic, no doubt, and not something I could or should ascribe to maintenance.

  I still made a mental note to have the batteries checked.

  There was a sound above me, as of dead leaves rustling in the wind. I looked up, and the night-haunts descended, a black cloak settling gently over the room. They touched down on the floor this time, folding their wings as they looked at me. Only the night-haunt with the Selkie’s face remained airborne.

  “We don’t care for blackmail, and we don’t care to be manipulated,” he said. “If you do either of these things again, we will dedicate ourselves to destroying you. Our reach among the living is limited, but there are ways. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” I said, without hesitation. I had no intention of doing this again, and his irritation was more than justified. I know what it is to be used for what I am and what I can do, with little regard for what I might desire.

  “What you asked of us should have been impossible. You understand that, as well?”

  “I do.” I cocked my head. “You said ‘should.’ It was not?”

  “Blood is strength, especially among the children of Oberon.” The Selkie smiled, and his teeth were too sharp and too bright for the kin his face would claim. “They call themselves Titania’s now, but the blood remembers, and the blood will always win.”

  “I brought you her blood.”

  “You did. You brought us blood and flowers—and you are, in your own way, the truest application of flower magic I’ve ever seen, in all my centuries. An illusion that thinks, dreams, and schemes for itself. Honestly, you
’re enough of a delight that I might have done this anyway, just for the sake of what you are.” He fixed me with a steely gaze, and he looked nothing like the Selkie at all, for all that he wore the Selkie’s face. “Never again. Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  “Promise on the loss of all our favors. We’ll take them back, if you betray us. The rules that separate us from the living have their loopholes.”

  “I promise you on the loss of all your favors. On the rose and the root and the rot and the thorn, I swear.”

  The Selkie nodded, apparently satisfied. “It is done,” he said, and snapped his fingers. The night-haunts rose in a whispering cloud, leaving the pale, motionless body of January O’Leary on the cafeteria floor.

  I blinked through space and was instantly beside her, dropping to my knees as I stared at the sharp points of her ears and the red-streaked brown of her hair. It felt like my code was freezing, like the disk that held my heart was glitching uncontrollably, making it impossible for me to move.

  The fire alarms went off. The sprinklers came on. I grabbed her body off the floor like a discarded doll, bundling her tightly in my arms, and I was gone, and so was she.

  When we had been testing the limits of what I could carry through the code—Mother laughing and throwing me things, Elliot wary and taking notes—we had determined that I could carry something twice my size a short distance, if the need was great enough. For living things, the journey would seem to take no more than an instant. They were blind to the code. For inanimate things, the length of the journey was irrelevant. For me, though . . . I felt every second.

  Five seconds, to pull my mother’s lifeless body from the cafeteria and into the electrical currents running through the knowe. Five seconds to travel from the cafeteria to the basement, where Li Qin and the others waited.

  I was dry when I reappeared, having shed the water somewhere between the seconds, but January was still wet and limp and dead in my arms. Li Qin screamed, a short, sharp sound, clapping her hand over her mouth and staring at us in abject shock. October and Quentin exchanged a nod, moving toward me, helping to lift January onto the nearest open cot.