“I purchased them earlier,” Butler demurred. “I have… instincts. Instincts that help ensure I have the proper things when people need them.”
Paul scanned the area, seeing nothing he needed. “What about me?”
“Alas, sir,” Butler said solemnly. “I’m afraid there’s only one thing that will allow you to relax.”
Butler stopped before an old-fashioned cell door: it had a slot to push food through, and a narrow opening to check in on the prisoner. Inside the cell, moonlight streamed through a barred window set high in the stained concrete.
The chipped walls had been inscribed with mysterious spiderwebbed lines.
And of course Butler was right. All Paul wanted was a lead on Aliyah.
Two lucite-encased mirrors were set high in the far corners; the protective shield surrounding the mirrors was cracked but not broken. The mirrors reflected dim starlight onto a barren mattress, an empty bucket, a tray with plates licked clean.
Through the mirrors, Paul saw the cell was empty.
Yet that blank space held a puzzling allure – Paul’s eyes skipped across the shadows. Something lurked in there. Hairs prickled on the back of his neck; looking away seemed dangerous. He had to find where the huntomancer hid, because the alternative was that something dreadful had escaped.
He stepped forward to get a closer look–
And it flickered.
The thing inside the cell moved too quickly for Paul to process – it practically teleported from shadow to shadow, like a smash-cut in a movie – blink, blink, and one muscled arm thrust out between the bars to crush Paul’s throat–
Butler pulled him back.
Bloodied fingers closed centimeters from Paul’s tie.
Paul froze, understanding why deer went numb in the headlights.
Steeplechase thrust his arm out, quivering with exertion – but though he’d slammed his body against the steel door, the only sound echoing through the asylum was Paul’s strangled cry of terror.
The huntomancer was old – older than Butler, scrawny, wiry, gray. Steeplechase had the grizzled, emaciated look of an ancient animal, something too stubborn to die. The curlicued scar around his wattled neck highlighted where his larynx had once been.
His ragged fingernails were chewed to razor-sharp points, but his bloodshot eyes were wet with tears.
Steeplechase held Paul’s gaze for a moment, furious – and when Butler jerked Paul backwards, Steeplechase flickered away to the far wall, clasped his hands over his balding head, and crouched down, bobbing in mute agony.
“He’s a bit of a guided missile, sir,” Butler explained. “He can’t think of anything but his target. He worsens daily. Which makes sense, I suppose; we are thwarting his obsession.”
“It must be…” Paul straightened his tie – a tie that seemed like a liability now that someone had tried to strangle him with it. “It must be a chore keeping him pent up here.”
“Not as much as you might think, sir,” Butler demurred. “He’s powerful, but terribly untrained. No capacity to hold his flux. His ’mancy rebounds on him. He’s found chinks in the walls – but utilizing his magic to do violence upon those weaknesses guarantees some unfortuitous coincidence alerts me whenever he’s close to freedom. If he could hold his flux, sir, he might be magnificent.”
Paul imagined those sharpened nails slicing his jugular. “Not the word I’d choose to describe him.”
“I don’t care how you describe him.” Imani stepped forward, peering fearlessly into the cell. “The question is, can he find our daughter?”
Steeplechase’s head whipped around.
Another flicker, and he was once again pressed against the cell, cocking his head like a hawk to examine Imani. His arm hung down from the cell window.
His cheeks glistened with tears.
Imani bowed her head, approached Steeplechase as though approaching a feral cat. “Her name is Aliyah. She’s a fighter. They stole her from us, Mr Steeplechase. She’s in the hands of men who will hurt her.”
With serene grace, Imani stepped into range of Steeplechase’s bladelike nails. Paul reached out for her – only to find Butler gripping his shoulder, one hand held up in a let’s see what happens motion.
Imani rested her palm on Steeplechase’s bloodied hand. He flinched at her touch, then froze as though afraid he might hurt her; he turned away, his tears flowing in streams.
“Please, Mr Steeplechase.” She spoke with the dignity of a down-on-her-luck businesswoman asking a renowned lawyer to take on a tough case. “Help us find our daughter.”
Steeplechase craned his head to look out through the barred window, out into the moonlight, clearly pondering his current target. Paul knew a ’mancer couldn’t break his rules – if Steeplechase believed he couldn’t give up the chase without cornering his prey first, he might not be able to switch targets.
Steeplechase’s scarred throat convulsed – was he trying to say something? Crying? Barking? It was hard to–
“Freeze!”
Flashlights bobbed across Paul’s face.
Four county cops made their way down the stairwell, guns out, screaming for everyone to get on the floor.
Twenty
Death of a Salesmancer
In Bastogne, Aliyah remembered a funny story Mommy had told her about Frisbee-herding sheepdogs.
The dogs had not, as Aliyah had surmised, herded Frisbees. But Mom’s friend had owned three shaggy dogs, and they ran free in a field while Mom’s friends played Frisbee. As usual, athletic Mom had sent the Frisbees soaring high and far across the field towards her buddies…
…except after half an hour, Mom’s friends were clustered within twenty feet of each other.
It was the damn sheepdogs, Mom had told her. We never noticed them herding us. They’d clip your heels here, crowd you close there, and before we knew it we stood in a circle laughing.
Theoretically the Unimancers let Aliyah wander freely, but they were sheepdogs.
If she approached the forest that covered Bastogne’s far ridge, a Unimancer stepped out from behind the washing line. If Aliyah side-eyed a horse, trying to remember what she’d learned from Red Dead Redemption, the Unimancers would start repairs on the ramshackle stables. If Aliyah darted into the refugees’ living quarters, which were mazes gouged out of the remaining buildings, a Unimancer would sit down on one of the wooden plank bridges above that connected the alcoves.
The Unimancers were ragtag – wizened Peruvian women dressed in men’s uniforms, stout African men with barrel chests, a pair of androgynous Russians who were either lovers or twins. Yet when each caught her eye, they shot her Ruth’s cocky grin.
Aliyah seethed. Bad enough the Unimancers had beaten her. But to know Ruth was taunting her…
Well, actually, seeing Ruth made her feel better. Now she’d witnessed the Thing lurking inside the broach – the first broach, the biggest broach, the broach – Aliyah’s gaze drifted upwards. The Thing twitched in the edges of her drugged vision like a spider, saturating her in a numb panic.
Nobody in town seemed to notice the chaos seething in their skies. They never looked up. She wanted to ask them how they lived beneath such dread mayhem, but none of the locals spoke English – and once the Unimancers had explained this strange girl’s presence to them, they nodded uneasily and kept their distance.
Aliyah caught fragments of German in their vocabulary, pondering how she might talk one of them into letting her escape, but their conversations didn’t sound like any German she’d ever heard; she suspected it was some pidgin dialect developed locally. Which also made sense. Aside from Unimancers arriving on horses, no visitors came.
Aside from the Unimancers, Bastogne had been isolated from civilization for over seventy years. Here was where the German Aryomancer squadrons had collected in a last-ditch attempt to break the incoming Allied forces – and the Allies had opted to make Bastogne a ’mancer-on-’mancer war, sending in the OSS Extraphysics Departments and the
American Paranormal Paratroopers and the remnants of the Russian Deathless resistance to blast out the last of the German magic.
It hadn’t ended well.
She looked for cars, motorcycles, any vehicle to steal – but those required roads, and it had been half a century since there’d been enough people left to lay asphalt. The paths the Unimancers took into the forest were dense trails barely wide enough to fit a horse.
Even if she escaped into the woods, where would she go? The horizon was crisscrossed with mutated physics: shimmering green fire-fields, spirals of glowing Cherenkov radiation, hazy black vortexes.
Between the obvious dangers stood empty fields. There were no trees in those cracked groves, no grass, no water. But something had changed in those innocuous-looking zones.
Getting lost in the woods would have been dangerous even in Kentucky. One wrong step here could transform her oxygen to radon. Using her ’mancy to guide her would rip open a new broach.
She couldn’t see a way out. Not without help.
She wasn’t sure how to guilt Ruth into helping her escape. But they were the only two teenaged ’mancers on the planet, as far as she knew; Ruth had been as curious to see her as Aliyah had been.
Separating Ruth from the hivemind would be her path to escape.
Still, escape seemed unsatisfying. She didn’t like looking up at the Thing in that cracked sky, but…
The locals lived in the skeleton of a once-great town. And even though these people were generations removed from the people who’d seen the broach end World War II, she saw Morehead in them – people who’d loved their town so much, they’d refused to leave.
Walking away from Bastogne gave her that queasy feeling of abandoning Morehead all over again.
People high in the buildings pointed up eagerly – a squadron of weather balloons drifting in, supplies dangling from their bellies.
The locals waved furiously at the balloons, as if hoping to steer them–
Four balloons hit a pocket of distorted physics, crumpled into nothingness.
Aliyah winced; sure enough, those woods were dangerous. The supply balloons rippled as a massive turbulence rose up from below, sending some crashing into the spiky trees.
Aliyah wondered how many balloons SMASH had sent out. They couldn’t have all been for Bastogne. They must have released thousands of balloons, drifting to cities across the continent, knowing a heavy percentage of supplies would never make it.
How dangerous was it, crossing Europe on horseback?
She wondered what Morehead would look like in fifty years.
Three balloons floated over the buildings; the Unimancers shot them down. Unimancers and civilians alike cheered, rushing towards the crashed food crates. Some they pawed through and recoiled from, holding their breath; somewhere along the way, something had transformed organic compounds into ammonia.
The rest scooped a broken sugar bag off the road and sifted out the dirt.
What a luxury those donuts had been. They must have contributed so many supplies…
It moved. The splintered sky shifted again.
Aliyah froze. If the Thing in the sky had raged, hammering at the interdimensional chinks, she could have relaxed. But that Thing moved nimbly, methodically, a burglar creeping up on windows to test the locks. It focused Its attention on weak spots, conducting unknowable experiments.
There was an intellect behind this amalgamation.
She curled up on a rooftop, trying not to think about It peering into Morehead.
Look at what your people did, Ruth had hissed.
How could Daddy have done ’mancy, knowing all this destruction was a bad spell away?
Her father would have a comforting explanation ready, she was sure. But alone, Aliyah struggled to justify her existence.
Ruth pulled herself up onto the roof with a gymnast’s skill. Aliyah kept her gaze on the sky, refusing to acknowledge Ruth’s presence – but Ruth pulled up hip-to-hip with her.
After a while, she asked, “Wanna get some dinner?”
The thought of eating made Aliyah sick. But company sounded good.
“I gotta top off your euclidosuppressants,” Ruth apologized, fishing a hypodermic out from her belt. “The general’s authorized a lower dosage – but you know what’ll happen if you do ’mancy.”
Ruth’s prison guard demeanor galvanized her. They had kidnapped her. If they didn’t need her to blackmail her father, she’d be in one of their torture-camps.
Her father was coming for her. Even in the most desolate place on Earth, her family would come get her – and when they rescued her, she’d gift them with dossiers of intel.
And then she’d beg her father to explain why he’d risked Morehead’s safety for a soccer game.
Ruth fumbled with the needle for a moment. Then her eyes glowed and her slender fingers found Aliyah’s vein with borrowed medical experience.
Aliyah respected the way Ruth didn’t press her for responses.
They sat on the roof as Aliyah felt her attention contract yet again. Before, the waving of branches in the wind had waved her attention up to that Thing; now, she could keep her focus down among the pines.
“We eat down the road,” Ruth told her.
Ruth helped Aliyah down. Her grip was sure and strong and more comforting than Aliyah wanted it to be.
They headed down a path through the woods – not a road, not after seventy years of overgrowth, but Aliyah picked out a trail from the buckled cobblestones embedded in the soil. Unimancers and locals plodded down the path.
Ruth stopped Aliyah near an otherwise uninteresting thicket.
“In the next five steps or so, you’re gonna see a blue flash.” Ruth pointed at a shimmering curtain rising into the air, a sparkling glow lost against the bobbing ferns – almost hypnotizing, in her current state.
Aliyah bit her cheek again. “In your next five words or so, you’re gonna give me an explanation.”
“Wish we had one. Far as we know, that’s trace amounts of the higher elements in your body disintegrating into radiation. Theory is the nuclear forces have weakened here, so anything high up in the periodic table…” She spread her fingers apart in a “poof” gesture.
“The theory?”
“Hey, we’ve got the brainpower–” she tapped her temple “–but even we can’t sense radiation. Baseline, we’re still human.”
“You’re SMASH. Shouldn’t you have fancy equipment to monitor things?”
Ruth pointedly stared out into the thick woods. Aliyah blushed, trying to imagine hauling delicate scientific equipment through the forest on horseback.
“The nuclear forces calm back down in a quarter mile,” Ruth continued. “But then you get to the mess hall, where mass spontaneously produces kinetic energy. At least that’s why we think everything vibrates there.”
“That doesn’t sound safe.”
Ruth snorted a bitter laugh. “Try walking into a zone where electrical resistance triples. Doesn’t affect trees, but it’ll stop your heart before you finish that step.”
“Best not to start that step, then. How do you tell the difference?”
“Maybe we don’t.”
Now Aliyah snorted. “So you wander blind? After seventy years of battling broaches? No wonder you’re losing.”
Sure enough, Ruth rose to the bait. “We–”
Then her eyes glowed, and Ruth gave Aliyah a smile as slow as syrup, nodding in admiration.
“Alllllmost got me,” she acknowledged. “But you’re in the only place on Earth we can guarantee your dad can’t get you. It’s not in our interests to educate you.”
Aliyah glowed with the compliment. This was literally the highest security prison in the world, and Ruth was correct: anything less, and she would have broken out, or Dad would have broken in.
Or maybe this whole activity was a psych op to give her Stockholm Syndrome.
“You’re not my friend,” she told Ruth, walking straight into the blue
flash.
Families gathered around a cavernous nylon blue tent, chatting loudly and drinking booze from plastic jugs. As Ruth approached, they shot her proud salutes; Ruth returned their salutes with cocky fingerguns.
The locals laughed with approval.
“They seem… happy… to see you,” Aliyah said.
“They’ve seen our sacrifices.” Ruth hugged a small child who brought her a sprig of rosemary. “We come to town to eat because they feel safer with us around.”
You can’t ever come back, Savannah had said.
Out in back, Unimancers and locals cooked a huge meal over campfires, adding spices from a plastic rack. Inside, the locals sat down, glad to socialize.
Yet Aliyah focused on the sixty Unimancers, each lining up to take a pitcher of gray fluid from a chilled rack. As Ruth had promised, the liquid in the pitchers churned despite the fact that they sat on ice-filled shelves; Aliyah felt her stomach gurgling, the fluids moving on their own.
That didn’t bother her. The Unimancers grabbing pitchers in synchronization, like a centipede’s legs? That made her shiver.
It felt like a drug trip, and her hyper focused attention didn’t help the matter. The Unimancers didn’t look at each other; Aliyah had fought them long enough to know they didn’t have to. As long as there was a critical mass of Unimancers present, they crowdsourced each other’s field of vision until they created a three hundred and sixty degree shared area map.
She should have been tense, but…
The locals hugged the Unimancers, waving them over to sit down, thanking them for the day’s assistance. And Aliyah was skeptical – this is where I discover they’re brainwashed to serve as the Unimancers’ slaves – but when she scrutinized the Unimancers, they looked more exhausted than the locals.
The drug also auto-focused her attention on the motion when the Unimancers moved to massage each other’s shoulders. Others hugged in groups, relishing the touch. Aliyah followed the ripples of laughter crisscrossing the room as the Unimancers shared secret jokes.
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