“He’s a sweetheart, he really is,” Uncle Robert assured her. “But I’m the best kite flyer in the camp, and I make Charlie Brown look like Ray Bethell.”
Like Aunt Valentine, Uncle Robert made a lot of references that nobody quite got. You learned to skip past these little ignorances, like thumbing past a cutscene.
“Anyway, Hamir needs to compete. It took me weeks to convince him the locals hunted birds, so he could too.”
She heard the smack as the hawk’s body hit a rock. It sounded like Rainbird slapping her.
You killed once, in self-defense, Rainbird had told her. Now it’s time you murdered. And that memory cascaded into flashbacks of Rainbird slaughtering everyone at the Institute to cover up their trail. Aliyah had done too much ’mancy, Rainbird had said, and he had to guarantee SMASH wouldn’t track them down.
She remembered how Rainbird had burned Wayne’s stuffed animal friends as they’d waddled in to rescue him. He’d cried the whole time, and then Rainbird had pushed him into the pyre. She remembered Idena, wrapped in her own origami and set alight…
“…Uncle Robert?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t want to see ’mancers.”
That was the nice thing about Uncle Robert; Mom, Daddy, Aunt Valentine, none of them knew how to relax. Robert understood the need for downtime.
“We got a guest cabin you can kip out in, if you need to stare at the walls a while,” he offered.
“That’d be good.”
He led her back to the main area. She trailed behind, wishing she could hold Dad’s hand and not feel quite so lonely.
Dad hated what Rainbird had done – but when he spoke of the incident, it was with pride: Rainbird, he told people, had proven Aliyah wasn’t a killer. And… yeah. After watching what killing had done to Rainbird, what Rainbird had wanted to do with her, Aliyah had vowed never to kill anyone ever again.
That wasn’t what Rainbird had taught her, though.
They walked up to the cabins – which weren’t cabins. They were raised off the ground on white oak boxes, which was weird–
– but what was even weirder was the cabins’ outward-facing walls were shelves.
In fact, now that she paid attention, the cabins had been assembled from identical, waist-high bookcases mortared together. Each bookcase had two shelves, glued into slots in the side, with a flat board on the top and bottom. Each seemed competently made, but not flashy.
The boxes on the bottom of the cabin, Aliyah realized, were bookshelves facing downwards, their backs pointed up. The walls were yard-high bookcases pushed together, stacked on 2x4s to separate them, and then the gaps plugged up with clay to keep the wind out.
Even the roof was bookcases slanted at an angle, the shelves facing downwards into the room so the rain wouldn’t catch in them, stacked onto beams and strapped in with nylon tie-downs.
“That’s… a lot of effort to build a cabin,” Aliyah said.
“Oh. Yeah.” Robert did a brief double-take, as if this bizarre sight had become so ordinary it had ceased to register. “Thaaaaat’d be Mr Oliszewski’s handiwork. He’s… Well, it’s a matter of debate around the camp what his ’mancy is. You could ask him yourself, if you don’t need responses. Quiet man. Like a walking marshmallow.”
She stepped up into the bookcase-cabin, squeezing through an entryway that was precisely the width of one narrow bookcase. The floor sunk under her weight. There was no door, aside from a heavy plywood sheet to slide in front of the entry gap. They’d put a wobbly rocking chair in there.
“Did he make the rocking chair?” Aliyah asked.
Robert snorted. “Oh, no. No, no, no. At 8:15 every morning, Mr Oliszewski rises. He bathes, dresses, at 9:25 he makes himself an egg-white omelet with low-fat Swiss cheese – he is very particular about his brand of Swiss cheese – and at 10:15, he starts cutting the boards for the day’s bookcase. At 11:10, he begins sanding. At 12:30, lunch – a ham sandwich with salad. At 1:15, he routs the dadoes for the shelves before dry-fitting the carcase at 2:05–”
“–I get the point–”
“–and come 4:30, he has glued together a bookcase. A very sturdy bookcase. Mr Oliszewski has been doing this ever since his retirement eighteen years ago. The exact same bookcase. Every time.”
“So why not tear them apart?”
Robert gave her a knowing grin. “You could try. We did. We have the reverse-Excalibur challenge – we bought an industrial-grade axe, and whoever makes a dent in one of Mr Oliszewski’s bookshelves gets to be King of Appalachia. Thus far? Not a scratch. Fire doesn’t touch ’em, we’ve thrown ’em at bears, dropped them off cliffs–”
Aliyah repressed a giggle. This was what her father loved about ’mancy – its unpredictability. Who would have guessed some reclusive hermit would produce unbreakable bookshelves?
She wanted to share this with him. He was so good at making magic seem like some marvelous gift. That’s why she always took him to see the ’mancers – Daddy would have found some way to make that dead hawk seem beautiful.
“So you built cabins out of them?”
“Mr Oliszewski makes one a day, rain or shine. They had them stacked into a pile we used to call Bookshelf Mountain, but that got to be visible from the air. So… they made cabins.” He thumped the side affectionately. “One day we’ll find a libriomancer and these guys will get on like a house on fire.”
She laughed – and then remembered what happened the last time she’d made friends with ’mancers, Rainbird had murdered them.
“Get out.”
Uncle Robert bowed and backed away respectfully.
She shouldered the heavy plywood in to block the entryway. The darkness felt good. Laughter was an addiction she needed to purge herself of.
Instead, she sat in a musty room, acclimating herself to the taste of no one.
Dad thought Rainbird had taught her not to kill. What Rainbird had actually taught her was that her friendship was a curse. She’d spent months telling herself she’d trained in ’mancy, it was safe to hang around people, she wouldn’t rain down unfathomable catastrophes on anyone she called a friend.
Aliyah bit her fingernails, felt the paint chip in her mouth.
She opened her backpack, set out the nail files and sponges she’d rescued from Morehead field. She scraped the old polish off, decided she was bored with these colors, mixed her own hues until she was satisfied. She sponged on a quick fade – a gradient from dark green at the cuticles, shading to pale white at the tips.
Boring. She’d done fade ombres before.
Frowning, she got out the cat-tail brush, deciding what to put on her nails. She threaded black throughout before realizing these were Minecraft colors, so she drew tiny creepers in the woods and diamond swords and pixelated Steve faces…
The creepers on her thumbs moved.
The diamond swords on her pinkies gleamed.
Aliyah screamed, snapping the brush in half.
She put her head in her hands, realizing yesterday’s nails had popped into flame when she’d concentrated on them. She just hadn’t thought anything unusual about it at the time.
It wasn’t videogamemancy she’d done, but fingernailmancy.
Anything she focused on enough would spark magic.
Kid, you’re a ’mancer, Aunt Valentine had told her once. Your dreams bleed out of your head and turn into reality. That means you will spend your life alone.
Even if she’d gotten her nail party with Savannah, she would have ruined it. She’d have gotten bored doing French manicures and tried something crazy, and concentrating on a new nail art would have sparked magic.
She flung the nail bottles at the wall, shrieking as they shattered. She clawed at the paint–
She’d destroyed a town full of good people for something that wouldn’t have even made her happy.
Worse, even with all that, she knew she’d try again. After a couple of years of loneliness, she’d get desperate enough to risk so
meone else’s life.
She hugged her knees, curling up in a corner. If she only had the strength to live alone. But family wasn’t the same as friendship, she was starved for friendship–
The plywood entryway splintered into pieces.
Aliyah screamed. Had SMASH found them at last? She felt relief – her struggles were over, someone would punish her–
Aunt Valentine stepped inside with smoking hands, biting her lip with embarrassment. “Sorry,” she apologized. “I panicked when I heard you yell. But your father – he’s summoning a War Table.”
* * *
“This is the most secure location you have?” Dad clutched a manila file folder to his chest as they approached a log cabin.
“It’s so secure you’ll need special glasses to visit Mawmaw,” Uncle Robert assured him, handing out black plastic horn-rimmed glasses. “Mawmaw’s sweet as sugar, but do not take these visors off or it’s Petrificus totalus time.”
They were prescription lenses that turned Aliyah’s vision into painful blurs. Valentine squinted out of one eye, fumbling her way ahead with outstretched hands towards the cabin, which seemed covered in dilapidated spiderwebs.
A pair of white-tailed deer stood before the cabin, staring mindlessly at the walls. They didn’t move as Imani crept towards them; the deers’ attention was focused entirely upon the fluttering white webs tacked to the cabin’s side.
“Sometimes I pretend this is a really good movie they came to watch,” Robert said. “You know, like one where Bambi goes on a roaring rampage of revenge against all the hunters.”
Uncle Robert slapped the deer on the flank – they looked startled, then fled.
“The cabin catches rabbits, raccoons, squirrels – they even found a bear hypnotized out here once. Waking Miss Grizzly up was some good times, I’m told.”
“Is this some Kiss of the Spider-Woman bullshit?” Valentine asked. “You know I’m not good with spiders. The best part of any dungeon crawl is reducing those chitinous fuckers to stains.”
Robert rubbed her shoulders affectionately, like a ringman readying a boxer. “Mawmaw wouldn’t hurt a fly. Come on, you’ll love her sweet tea.”
Mawmaw, as it turned out, was a sweet sun-wrinkled grandmother who apologized for not having more ice for her sweet tea, the electricity kept going out here, but all the boys and girls were absolutely lovely. She was far too old to walk around, these fine people had taken her from the nursing home, but they’d put her up in this lovely well-kept cabin and have you seen my doilies? Goodness, I couldn’t get by without my lace. The boys, they put them up on the walls for me.
Mawmaw sat in her rocking chair, surrounded by wafting lace circles, a ball of thread sitting by her gnarled feet, her knitting needles never ceasing as she leaned forward to ask Aliyah how old she was.
Aliyah tried her best to answer, but the elaborate lace patterns on the doilies distracted her. They spiraled into tight Mandelbrot loops, impossibly complex patterns that kept revealing more patterns. Following their corkscrew arches with her eyes had the pleasure of chasing a man down a busy street – she trailed a thin thread through a complex intersection, then navigated her way to the anchor-point of the next knot.
Mawmaw had been talking for minutes. Aliyah couldn’t tell you what she’d said.
She reached up to take off these damned glasses to get a better look…
“Hang on, kid,” Robert warned her, grabbing Aliyah’s shoulder. “She’s almost asleep…”
Sure enough, Mawmaw slid into slumber. Yet even though she snored like a frail spinster, her knitting needles clicked on in her sleep.
Aliyah felt light-headed, despite the monstrous headache shooting through her temples from the glasses. She needed to follow the patterns to the center…
Valentine rapped her knuckles on Aliyah’s scalp. “Not the time to see the sailboat in the Magic Eye, kid,” she whispered.
Aliyah had long determined she’d never get all of Aunt Valentine’s references.
“They are pretty,” Mom sighed, looking around. “It’s not the worst thing to lose your mind in, I suppose. She doesn’t even know she’s a ’mancer, does she?”
Robert shook his head. “No. But she almost took out her nursing home. The nurses went into her room to look at her craftsmanship. They stayed for days…”
Aliyah felt a tremendous sympathy welling up for this old, frail woman. Like Aliyah, she’d set off a process she hadn’t fully understood – Mawmaw had meant to make pretty doilies.
She wished she could still see things the way she had back at the Institute, back when she’d been intoxicated with masqueromancers and plushiemancers. That old Aliyah would have admired the cunning knotwork, gushed to her daddy how Mawmaw had made patterns so artful that they were, literally, mesmerizing.
Yet all Aliyah could think of was that roomful of starving, hypnotized nurses.
Now Mawmaw had nodded off, the only sound in the cabin was the click-click-click of her needles.
Dad flipped nervously through the folder he’d brought, frowning down at it.
Mom sat between them, wearing too much makeup – never a good sign. Mom was usually super-stylish, but when she got stressed she scrubbed her face clean, then repainted it with sharp edges that made her look catlike. She sat stiffly, looking haggardly at Dad like she was committing his face to memory.
Aunt Valentine and Uncle Robert, well… They held hands lovingly, thirsty for each other’s skin contact as always, except Aunt Valentine was squinting at the doilies as though they were a puzzle to be solved and Uncle Robert was sweating as he fumbled in his pocket.
It’s a ring, Aliyah realized. He’s working up the courage to give her a ring.
Aunt Valentine and Uncle Robert had dated for five years, and even though Aunt Valentine had made it clear she retained the ability to date whoever she goddamned well pleased, she’d never so much as looked at another man since they’d almost snapped the Institute in half with their disgusting magical kinky sex.
They kept everyone up at night, slapping and grunting and slamming each other against walls, which everyone pretended not to hear. And Aunt Valentine always glowed with cryptic smiles the next morning…
But then she’d trail behind Uncle Robert as he went about his day, thumbing her Nintendo DS while Robert oversaw the creation of another safehouse or did another security walkthrough for Daddy’s next speech or disappeared for a day or two as he made secret Project Mayhem plans that Aunt Valentine couldn’t know about in case SMASH pried open her brains.
And Aunt Valentine stayed glued to her screen, coruscating with banked magical potential, charting increasingly elaborate speed runs on the toughest games as she prepared for the day when Uncle Robert would need her to go super saiyan.
Except Uncle Robert was so good at what he did, he needed super saiyan Valentine less and less.
But Aliyah knew what Uncle Robert was thinking. He’d almost lost Aunt Valentine to the Morehead broach. The government was coming for them. Shouldn’t he propose before something went wrong?
Aliyah tolerated their squicky sex because they were still ridiculously schmoopy despite their bruisetastic ways. She could see Uncle Robert debating whether proposing now would be romantic enough, then deciding the War Table would be too much of a distraction.
She should have been disappointed. But proposing to someone like Aunt Valentine was like tipping over a Coke machine – you couldn’t do it in one push. You had to work your way up to it.
She wondered what kickass dress she’d get to wear at the wedding.
Daddy cleared his throat. “All right. I, uh… This is too big for one man’s decision. So I’ll take your vote.”
He passed out copies of a memo – official-looking paperwork, brandished with a government seal, signed with a flourish by some general with a ridiculously swoopy signature.
It was hard reading it through the warped glasses. Aliyah had just gotten to the terrible part when Valentine ripped her copy
in half.
“This guy has balls the size of Rhode Island, if he thinks we’re gonna let you turn yourself in,” she spat, keeping her voice low so as not to wake Mawmaw. “And I’m gonna remove his swollen balls, plop ’em on a fuckin’ hibachi, and chop ’em into testicle sashimi so I can force-feed him balls till his stomach bursts.”
Daddy sagged in relief.
She realized: He thought we’d ask him to turn himself in. She realized Daddy had been willing to sacrifice himself a hundred times over to save Aliyah, so of course he’d sacrifice himself to save the people of Morehead.
All that held him back was his loyalty to his family.
She thought she felt guilty about Morehead.
“You can’t turn yourself in,” she said. “But… we have to rescue them.”
“We will not.” Mom’s voice was taut as piano wire. “We don’t know where they are. We don’t have the Contract anymore. With the government out to get us, we cannot afford to take risks.”
“Actually…” Dad ignored the way Mom’s head snapped around. “I think I know where they are.”
“They’re off the books! They are invisible to you!”
“They are, yes. But… troop logistics always leave ripples. Morehead-Rowan airport has been closed to the public until 12:00 noon tomorrow. There’s been emergency jet fuel supplies diverted there. It’s possible that’s to handle the broach, but…”
Valentine nodded. “…driving two hundred native prisoners of war across the country risks seriously bad PR. They’re gonna fly ’em out.”
“If this operation is off the books, their organization has to be for shit,” Robert said. “They don’t know we know where the prisoners are. They won’t expect us to come at them – especially given we’ve never rescued mundanes before. Given that it’s been–” he checked his cell phone “–a little over six hours since everything hit the fan, they probably won’t be expecting us to go on the offensive.
“This could work.” Uncle Robert tapped his fingers against his teeth. “This could actually work.”
Mom gripped the rocking chair’s armrests hard enough to yank one of them straight off the frame. “That’s too many ifs to risk a family on. Driving back into a hornet’s nest of Unimancers when they’re already on high alert is suicide! What will we do when they capture you, Paul?”
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