“Consensus,” she whispered. Ruth’s face held the giddy relief that Aunt Valentine had whenever she emerged mussy-haired from a motel room with Uncle Robert.
“No dissenting opinions allowed, eh?” Aliyah needled.
Ruth wasn’t bothered. “No unwise opinions. Why should I tell you how we operate, when there’s a risk of you being a chip in some hostage exchange? I’m not sending you home with new intel just because you got my goat.”
Aliyah bleated.
Ruth smiled. Aliyah hated the way she liked that smile. She’d always fallen for people who challenged her. But Rainbird had challenged her – and Rainbird had been a psychopath murderer trying to turn her into a hired killer.
She was already thinking of Ruth as a friend, which was the most dangerous trap of all.
So when Ruth left – and Ruth had to leave before someone discovered her, because she’d admitted she wasn’t supposed to be here – Aliyah would figure out how to get the handcuffs off. Uncle Robert had taught her how to unlock cuffs, and if she could remember how to–
Ruth closed her fingers around Aliyah’s wrist.
Aliyah realized she’d been staring at the handcuffs as she pondered her escape, telegraphing her next move.
“You’re gonna escape unless we get you to realize why you need to stay put,” Ruth whispered. “You’re not like the other ’mancers – I’ve seen Legomancers cry when they realized we had nothing for them to assemble. Most of the others sink into the drugs. The general thinks you’ll break down without your dad – but you’ll fight until you get back to him, won’t you?”
Aliyah closed her eyes, refusing to give Ruth – and all the Unimancers watching her through Ruth – an answer.
Ruth unlocked the cuffs, slipped the needle out of Aliyah’s hand. Aliyah tensed – was this a psych-ops challenge, where they’d pretend to set her free to see how she reacted?
She sat in the chair, refusing to budge.
Stiff fingers jabbed into the inside of her elbow. Ruth tugged; Aliyah’s body followed before Aliyah told it to stop.
Aliyah braced herself. Ruth stepped alongside, dropping into a policeman’s come-along position – but when she jerked Aliyah’s wrist to the breaking point, Aliyah stayed put.
“Think this hurts?” Aliyah hissed. “Try having your skin stripped off in the burn ward.”
Ruth pulled her forward again, experimentally. Aliyah didn’t move.
“You little…” Ruth’s consternation was laced with an admiration that Aliyah drank up. “I’m trying to help.”
“Help one more step, and I’ll yell. How will the general react when he finds you smuggling me out?”
“Jesus Christ. You’re my age.”
It should have sounded like a complaint – but it was a compliment. They were both teenaged ’mancers, forced into lifestyles they’d never asked for. And though Aliyah didn’t know what had happened to Ruth, they were both veterans. They should be competing on the cheerleading squad, or daydreaming about their driver’s license–
Yet they both felt more comfortable in this prison than they would have on a soccer field.
“Come on.” Ruth let go. “You’ll hurt yourself trying to escape. You’ll hurt all of us, unless I show you why you want to stay put. I know you don’t want to hurt anyone.”
Aliyah resisted long enough to pluck a Vanilla Kreme donut from the box before exiting. If the Unimancers did speak Uncle Kit’s donut-language, they’d know Vanilla Kreme meant “reckless rebellion.”
She stepped outside. The sky was splintered into golds and crusted reds, streaked with colors that hurt to look at. Aliyah slumped down on the three wooden steps leading up to the office – which she noted was on wheels – clutching her head.
“It’s the drugs, mostly.” Ruth caught Aliyah in one hand, rescued the donut with the other. “Once you understand why you can’t escape, we’ll see if we can’t talk the general into lowering the dosage. Otherwise, you’ll fuzz out whenever someone walks by. Eat the donut, a filled stomach will help.”
Aliyah studied her shoetips. Her mission was clear: play on Ruth’s sympathy, flush the drugs from her system, chip away at their security.
“I suppose you’d know all about what they do to ’mancers here…” Aliyah muttered.
“Well, yeah. But only because I’m linked into everybody else’s memories. I took a different path into Unimancy.”
“’Cause they caught you doing ’mancy before you were out of diapers?” That wasn’t strategy – it slipped out. She really did want to know how Ruth had become a ’mancer.
“No. Because I…” Ruth blew a lock of hair out of her face. “Yes. Yes, I know she’s working me. Just trust I’m not gonna fuck this up?”
Aliyah grinned ruefully. She knew that tone all too well.
“Unimancers?” she joked. “More like Unimommies.”
Aliyah was expecting to see either Ruth’s anger, or her shy grin – but instead, Ruth hugged her knees to her chest. “They’re a real family, Aliyah. They protect people. Not like the selfish pack of idiots you call kinfolk.”
“They’re not selfish – Daddy would give his life for me–”
“And the lives of everyone in Morehead!”
Aliyah’s skin prickled: how had that slipped her mind? Her flux had opened a broach that had triggered an emergency evacuation. Savannah and Latisha, forced to move from their homes–
She’d forgotten.
Maybe she was selfish.
But she wouldn’t admit that to Ruth.
“That broach opened because they were afraid!” she spat. “Because you made them afraid! Your anti-’mancy propaganda, you scared them until they fought us, and–”
Ruth’s cheeks flushed with rage. “You think you want your dad to rescue you. You think you wanna escape. You even have the gall to think you’re the good guy. Well, stand up, little ’mancer. Time to meet the real world.”
Ruth hauled Aliyah to her feet.
This had been a mountain town, once, a grand street winding between great gabled houses – but it had been encroached by thick forests, and unhealthy black trees had pushed massive holes through the brick walls. The survivors had strung plastic tarps between the gaps of the leaning buildings, shored up the collapsing houses with stout oaken logs, created a tiny refugee city in the hollows of what once had been a thriving town.
Aliyah saw black-uniformed Unimancers stepping from wooden barracks piled high with camouflage-green sleeping bags. Yet the city was strewn with haggard survivors: two emaciated boys staggering home underneath the weight of a dead deer. An old woman with a plastic axe, her gauze-wrapped hands bleeding from where she’d chopped wood for the incoming winter. A family working in unison to make arrows – a boy carving the shaft, his sister tying machine-tooled metal heads to the front, the father applying the fletching.
They wore bizarre mixes of deerskin boots and puffy orange winter jackets. And they worked in conjunction with the Unimancers – a Unimancer trotted in on a horse, and the locals helped the Unimancer down, rubbed her horse dry, offered to clean her rifle.
The locals ignored Aliyah. They set to their tasks with the grave singularity of people who depended on their work to survive, their necks bowed from forever staring downwards.
The Unimancers, however, strode out to stare at Aliyah with grave sadness.
Ruth shook Aliyah. “Don’t look back at us. Look up. Look at what your people did.”
Aliyah lifted her gaze up over the shanty refugee town. She looked up the steep mountainside, past the blasted slopes of dead trees–
Her scream died in her throat.
The sky was splintered, like a shattered pane of stained glass. It flexed dangerously, as though some immense oceanic pressure from the other side weighed down upon it – and every time it pulsed, it exhaled buzzsect swarms–
“Look at it!” Ruth grabbed Aliyah’s hair, forced her gaze back to that shattered landscape. “You know what that is! Everyone does!�
��
Some of the shards had tumbled from the sky, falling out like jigsaw pieces to reveal a blank whiteness – an emptiness more terrifying than any black. And obscured behind those gaps was a striding storm of edges, a six-legged whirlwind crouching down to push itself through the gap–
“Say it.” Ruth shook her like a rag doll. “Say where we are!”
“Bastogne.” Aliyah wanted to sound tough – but watching this devastation, Aliyah’s voice leaked out like a deflating balloon. “World War II’s final battle. The broach’s epicenter.”
“You’re in Europe now, kid,” Ruth told her. “And your daddy doesn’t dare come here.”
Nineteen
Wodehouse is a Very Very Very Fine House
“So who’s guarding the huntomancer?” Paul asked.
As Robert fumed at the wheel, driving them to an unknown location, Paul wondered whether handing the fine details of Project Mayhem over to Robert had been a good idea. It meant the Unimancers couldn’t destroy Project Mayhem if SMASH brainwashed Paul – but it also meant Paul was reliant on Robert’s dwindling goodwill.
The silence lengthened, became itchy. Valentine sat in the back, arms crossed, expecting an apology. Except she seemed rattled by Robert’s coldness; she’d kept stealing glances at him over her Nintendo DS, as if expecting him to reach back to take her hand.
“Robert,” Paul insisted. “I recognize your concerns about this mission’s exposure. But if we’re going to use him to find Aliyah, I need informa–”
“The Butler is guarding the huntomancer.”
Robert spoke curtly, a prisoner giving his rank, name, and serial number.
“I assume he’s a ’mancer?”
“The Butler is neither a ‘he’ nor a ‘she.’ At best, they identify as ‘servant.’”
Paul nodded, mentally checking off the “other” box in the male/female/other field on his internal forms.
“But yes,” Robert continued. “They’re a servantmancer.”
Valentine coughed. “Shouldn’t you get, I dunno, a guardomancer?”
Robert glared out at the road. For a moment, Paul thought Robert might ignore her. Given that Valentine was gripping her DS like a weapon, he wasn’t sure how he’d keep the peace if Robert blew her off–
“Jailing people wasn’t our mission,” he said stiffly. “When I’ve had a choice in which ’mancers I’ve been able to save, I’ve prioritized acquiring combat and camouflage skills to keep us safe come the day.”
“What day?” Paul asked.
“The day they outlawed us. I thought we had seven years before they dropped the RICO act on us – but whoa, Morehead yanked the hands forward on that Doomsday clock.”
“You were planning a decade ahead?”
Robert gave a bitter laugh – reminding Paul that sunny Robert still had plenty of Tyler Durden’s black nihilism floating around inside. “Ending segregation took a hundred years, Paul. Gay marriage took forty. Did you think you’d make the world safe for ’mancers in time for Aliyah’s sweet sixteen party?”
Robert chuckled as he flicked off the headlights, nudged a creaking gate open with the bumper, and pulled onto a cracked road leading into an abandoned asylum.
Paul scratched his neck, feeling foolish. He’d kind of thought he would fix America’s politics for Aliyah.
“That’s what happened to my sense of adventure, Valentine,” Robert said pointedly. “Staying ahead of the government. Winning. This is a guerrilla war, and you win those through smart use of forces and moral superiority on the ground. Project Mayhem was designed to endure. This is what we do.”
“‘You are not your job,’” Valentine quoted dully. “‘This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.’”
Quoting Fight Club to Robert was like slapping him in the face. He hunkered down over the wheel, face darkened.
“As for the huntomancer,” Robert said quietly, “I’ll let Butler explain the sitrep to you.”
Imani frowned. “You haven’t called anyone since Paul made the decision to come here.”
“Butler always knows when company’s coming.”
He backed the car up next to a set of wide, cracked steps. The asylum had once exemplified the grand brass architecture that only really got funded in the 1940s, but its steps were now littered with water-soaked roofing tiles and broken beer bottles.
Paul quashed the itch to magically access the failed building inspection records so he’d know when the institute had been condemned – once, acquiring that information would have been trivial. But he felt the black flux pressing in, eager to punish his curiosity. From the half-collapsed roof and layers of graffiti, he guessed it’d shuttered its doors two decades back.
The overcast moon above gave them enough light to pick their way up the buckled stairs.
The chained doors rattled open.
A hooded lantern shone respectfully at their feet, offering guidance.
They had to move quickly; most of Project Mayhem’s safehouses were squatter locations. Robert had tucked the car by the asylum’s side, out of casual observers’ sight; they didn’t need the cops arriving to investigate.
Paul braced himself to see a stern Englishman in a valet outfit, holding the door for him–
Which is why he was surprised to find an old, bare-chested white man in a leather collar, vest, and cap.
Paul cruised to a halt, staring, knowing he was being rude but uncertain how to stop. He knew he was being rude by thinking of Butler as a man when the Butler identified themselves as a they, but…
The Butler stood at an attention so firm, any rudeness slid off their polished leather vest. Moonlight glinted off the silver chains that connected Butler’s nipple rings to Butler’s burnished leather pants; though their body was grizzled, Butler’s face was hairless, cherubic, their cap set at a jaunty angle.
Butler held their leash in one hand, the lantern in the other, ready to offer either if needed.
“Sheeeeiiiit.” Valentine’s voice was low with admiration as she joyfully turned to Robert. “So these are the kinds of secret adventures you’re off having? This is top-tier magic, Robert.” She saluted Butler. “High-protocol service kink turned to ’mancy? Not my style – too many rules – but respect, old bean. Respect.”
She held out her fist. With a glimmer of ’mancy, Butler slapped their leash over their shoulder in a crisp military salute, then reached out to meet Valentine’s fist-bump, their two protocols melding seamlessly.
Butler bowed, nipple-chains jangling. “Mr and Ms Tsabo-Dawson. Mr Paulson. If you’ll allow me to escort you inside, I’ll do my best to answer your enquiries.”
* * *
Butler led them through decaying hallways strewn with rusted gurneys and smashed-in prescription cases.
“I leave it untidy near the entryway, so casual visitors won’t investigate,” they said, in a voice tinged with a faint Southern drawl. “I have arranged nicer accommodations for our poor guest.”
“Poor?” Valentine asked. “Guest? Didn’t this huntomancer murder three ’mancers?”
“So he did,” Butler agreed. “But you don’t murder that many people without carving up your soul. Adding more punishment wouldn’t help the poor lad. I care for him with all possible gentleness, in the hopes that kindness might resuscitate his compassion.”
Paul flicked a gaze towards Robert, understanding why he’d chosen a servant to imprison the huntomancer. Butler was both detail-oriented, and devoted to the huntomancer’s safety: a perfect warden.
Valentine shot him fingerguns. “Man, if I’m gonna be chained up, I want it to be you, Barney.”
Imani did a double-take. “Did you call them a purple dinosaur?”
A slight grin crept across Butler’s face. “No, ma’am. She’s referring to Hannibal Lecter’s able prison caretaker in Silence of the Lambs. A high compliment.”
Valentine threw her hands up in triumph. “At last! Someone who gets my pop-culture references!”
“I thought…” Paul blushed, hating to ask foolish questions, but Butler’s ease made every query seem reasonable. “Didn’t he slit his throat?”
Butler rounded a corner, moving deeper into the asylum’s interior; the lantern played over scrubbed cell doors, the cells themselves threadbare but as welcoming as hostel accommodations. “So he has, sir. I’ve never heard him make a sound – you could listen all day and never know he was in his cell.”
“So how do you know his name?”
“His clothing had a name stitched upon the inside.”
Paul frowned. “Steeplechase. The mob had a huntomancer, back when I worked on the force…”
“Same person, sir.” Butler led them down a freshly-mopped stairwell, into a basement where the peeling paint had been scraped away. “We got an anonymous mob informant. Apparently, his superiors had set Mr Steeplechase on a target so monstrous it caused a crisis of conscience. They begged us to stop him before he reached his target.”
“Yes, but…” Something about Steeplechase tickled Paul’s memory. They’d called in the mob’s huntomancer once to track down a serial killer. He hadn’t been involved, but he’d heard rumors–
He wished he hadn’t popped another Oxycontin before their arrival. His memories swam away like startled goldfish.
Yet as they walked down the stairs, Paul felt his cares easing away. The smell of chamomile tea filled his nostrils, and somehow tiny Butler had hauled several comfortable leather chairs into this distressing madhouse basement, giving it the semblance of home. Robert’s favorite newspapers lay spread open across silver trays, and a thick chocolate milkshake sat inside a chilled ice bucket waiting for Valentine, and a pressed business suit in Imani’s size was hung neatly inside a small armoire.
“Did you lay this outfit out for me?” Imani asked, plucking at the emergency clothing they’d purchased at a Target.
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