Recursion

by Marion G. Harmon

  A minute turned into five before I straightened up, stood up, and made myself leave my sanctuary. The door didn’t open into the hall. Instead Erica Free stood waiting for me, arms crossed and tapping a very nice open-toed shoe.

  “Young lady, we need to talk.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “I’ve met three people who I’d label Omega Class: Kabukicho, Quan Yin, and now Erica Free, the Lady of Doors. Each comes with their own separate reality where they’re functionally omnipotent: Kabukicho’s fishbowl pocket-world, Quan Yin’s High Plane of Heaven, and Ms. Free’s Castle of Doors. Ms. Free is reputedly less powerful in the ‘real world.’ (Only Ultra-Class, ha ha.) Why do Omegas all seem to be supernatural or divine breakthroughs? What would an Omega Verne-Type or ‘alien’ Omega look like? I’m not sure I want to know.”

  From the Journal of Hope Corrigan

  * * *

  I dropped Malleus by the empty chair and glared at Kitsune. “Sorry I’m late.” Far too late, and time for answers. Shell had chosen the same guest-office Dr. Mendel used for her visits to the Dome. I wondered if there was a message there, but now it was just me and my husband. Maybe my husband. I was going to find out.

  Kitsune eyed the short-handled battle maul. I’d gone upstairs and retrieved Ajax’s spare—the one not broken by Seif-al-Din—from the Dome Museum as soon as I’d finished “talking” with Ms. Free. She snickered. “I’m not going to attack you over it, I promise. What happened?”

  “Villain-X.” Throwing myself into the chair, I looked her over. As Rei, Kitsune sounded and acted like exactly what she was; a college age Asian-American girl. The combination of red hair and almond-shaped green eyes must have made the real Rei irresistible to the boys. Pulling off my mask, I ran fingers through my hair.

  “The Lady of Doors dropped by to tell me the uninvited Villain-X tried to trash her castle and it ejected him through some random door on Earth. I hope he’s in upper Mongolia somewhere, but I’m not that lucky. And she took away my keycard.”

  “So you’re getting ready for him?”

  “I beat him twice, but the second time he was boosted and I probably wouldn’t have won if he hadn’t been dying.” After grabbing Malleus, I’d talked with Vulcan through Shell, asked him if he could fabricate the armor he’d done—would do for me—later. “But you know all that.”

  She blinked innocently. “I do?”

  “You’d better, because I need to know which Kitsune you are. Are you the one before the whole Villains Inc. affair? Or are you the one from where I am? I trust that one, so tell me about our dates.”

  She smiled and I caught the Kitsune grin—my Kitsune’s grin—in there, the hint of dimple as one corner curled slightly higher than the other one.

  “Alright, the last date I remember before all of this began was just before midsummer.” She settled back, her grin turning salacious. “And I got into your lap.”

  My face burned, but I didn’t look away. He had. After everything that had happened with my cross-reality adventures, we’d started officially “courting.” I’d come home to change for a casual night out, and gotten his text that he’d been delayed but I should get comfy and he’d show up. I should have remembered his love of pranking me every way he could without a flat-out lie (since that would break his kami-thing). I’d settled in on my bed with a history book and hot chocolate. Not long after Graymalkin wandered in and jumped up to settle in my lap. I’d read and sipped and stroked his ears as he rumbled for a good half hour before Graymalkin wandered in and found himself already in my lap.

  The hissing, spitting cat hadn’t been the one in my lap. Kitsune had been lucky I’d opened the window before tossing him out of it and yelling “Next time, knock!”

  “Yes, you did. And who was at our wedding?”

  “Your best friend, your loyal sword, your sister, and a goddess.” She smiled wickedly. “Your mother’s going to kill us.”

  I let out a shaky breath. Okay. This was the Kitsune I’d exchanged promises with, oaths made during Kabukicho’s stupid game and sealed with our marriage by a goddess. I could trust this one, and just knowing that made me a little giddy. “Why are we here?” I whispered.

  She studied my face, her eyes darkening. “I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know.”

  I swallowed my disappointment. “Then how did you— Why did you—”

  Her sly smile returned. “My kami nature. We knew I’d remember more than you did. I’ve been able to reach you before, and we’d hoped I’d be able to share if we strengthened our bond.” She leaned forward and took my hand, fingers threading through mine. Lifting it, she lightly kissed a knuckle. “And it worked, I did.”

  I reclaimed my hand. “The other night—”

  “Yes.” She laughed. “Not that I don’t enjoy sharing your bed, but yes I woke you up.” She sat back. “Confusion to our enemies.”

  “Our enemies. The Ascendancy.”

  She shook her head. “Nope. I serve the Chrysanthemum Throne, and I’m not here for those murdering maniacs. I’m here for the evil bastard responsible for making all of this happen this time around. I’m after Johnny Cho, a monster who serves One Land.”

  * * *

  And Kitsune told me a story. After the fall of the Soviet Union, tons of KGB documents had been declassified and released. They’d revealed a whole world of nasty covert operations. One pre-Event Cold War op, approved but not implemented, was a plan to bomb locations in Harlem. After the bombings, the agents would have made anonymous phone calls to two or three Black organizations to claim credit for the explosion—as the Jewish Defense League.

  “It's what’s called a false flag operation,” she explained evenly. “El Doppo’s attempted assassination of Baldur at last fall’s Capecon was the same thing—it would have been blamed on anarchist anti-government groups. The Soviets played with the idea of kicking off a race-war, or at least race-riots they could distract the US with. Johnny Cho is One Land’s shot at something like it.”

  “Chinese nationalists want to start a race-war? With who?”

  “Breakthroughs.”

  “We’re not a— Oh.” I rubbed my face. I really was too tired.

  Humanity First. The National Public Safety Act. Three years from now, we’d look back at the first months after the California Quake and know we’d dodged a bullet. Things had almost gotten bad. National grief and hysteria had almost taken us to a place we didn’t want to go. “Johnny—Cho? Who is he? What can he do? What’s his plan? How do you know about it? And what happened the first time?”

  Kitsune stood and started pacing the small office. It was a new mannerism. One that belonged to Rei?

  “Cho’s a Mentalist-Type, a telepathic manipulator. He works one-on-one, and can psychically manipulate someone into doing anything they’re even a tiny bit inclined to do. That might not sound like much, but he takes the chains off your inner monsters, the one restrained by reason, empathy, and societal norms. He’s left a trail of human bombs—not literal bombs, but you get the idea.”

  I nodded my understanding when she looked at me, trying not to curl around the sinking in my gut. This was getting worse and worse.

  “The first time around when I tracked Cho to Chicago,” she continued, “Defensenet Intelligence let the DSA know before I got here. I never found Johnny. He’d buried his connections—six feet under—and cut out early. There was a leak somewhere. You still got hit by part of his network, Villains Inc., after I flushed them out.”

  “Wait, what? I thought that was your family vendetta! And the rest was all Hecate, she was insane— Um.”

  Blackstone had told us, way back then, that for a criminal group to directly attack the forces of law and order was insane. The CPD and the DSA had eventually decided that the insanity was all Hecate’s, but she’d been dead so they couldn’t ask her. The others they’d been able to question had all confirmed that Hecate’d seriously believed whacking away at the Sentinels with her little murder-band had
been the way to get to Kitsune. If that wasn’t true, was I going to have to rewrite everything I thought I knew? I raised my head to find Kitsune looking back at me expectantly.

  “Okay, what really happened?”

  “What really happened was Hecate got paid a mountain of money to catch or kill me. She didn’t need to win against you guys, she just needed to keep you off her back until she’d caught up with me. You thwarted that with your temporary magic-bloodhound power—if you hadn’t found her, she’d have disappeared. I’m pretty sure Cho used his power to twist her greed into an obsession with getting the job done, too.”

  I considered it. “But even if she’d got you, I don’t think that would have really tipped things. Would it?”

  Rei snorted inelegantly. “I doubt it. But killing me was never part of the plan—I was just an irresistible target of opportunity. The big plan for Chicago—whatever it was—was probably tied to the Ascendancy.”

  “How is that— What did you know about the Ascendancy? Before the Wreckers went public, I mean.”

  “Nothing. But international intelligence agencies everywhere were zeroed in on an unknown breakthrough who could augment other breakthroughs. Wire a few million dollars into an untraceable offshore bank account, and your chosen agent got a lot more powerful for a while. We’d been looking for him for two years, and my sources told me One Land had included just that kind of force-multiplier in its plans. Cho’d planned something big to put a cap on your whole Villains Inc. fight, but he cut out before setting it all up.”

  “You were trying to mousetrap the Ascendant in Littleton, weren’t you?”

  She gave me a brilliant smile. “Why yes, yes I was. Other things too, of course. And you did get his first-string soldiers there, so, yay for that!”

  “And now? Why are we here? And why is it so different, this time?”

  “Here there’s no leak because I haven’t told anybody about Cho, not even Defensenet Intelligence. I’m here without the blessing of the Chrysanthemum Throne. Here, Cho hasn’t cut out. The full op is happening.”

  She ticked off items on her fingers.

  “The pyrokinetic murders? He’s a contractor brought in to clean up loose ends in advance of the main event. Benjamin Trent, the gravikinetic? If you look at the jobs he took before he died, I’d say that he was a B Class, but based on the damage he did Blackstone was pretty sure he was pushing A Class the night he died. Trent was power-boosted and drugged up and sent out to blow up somewhere before he died. Cho made him a human bomb, and if you hadn’t responded so well there would have been a lot more death. He’d have taken dozens with him.

  “Flash Mob and Tin Man hitting you,” she went on before I could object. “Hecate dropping a demon on you? The first direct attacks on the Sentinels, aimed at you because you’d just popped back up on the public radar and are the Hero of Whittier Base. Publicly you’re the highest-value Sentinel target.”

  There she stopped and laughed. It wasn’t a that’s funny laugh.

  “You didn’t go down because they were fighting you, not the younger you. That must have set them back, so they threw a heavy punch to get somebody, make the Sentinels bleed. And now that Blackstone’s down, the last active founding Sentinel, what’s the next phase? I don’t know what it is—Cho is covering his tracks too well. I haven’t been able to find him.”

  She stopped again, breathing hard.

  “But what’s the main event— Lebensborn.”

  “What?”

  “The Answer Box’s answer. Lebensborn. Pellegrini, he wants more breakthroughs. It’s what he’s all about. The Foundation of Awakened Theosophy’s core belief is that when enough breakthroughs have awakened the whole world will ascend. A superhuman singularity event.” I threw my head back, staring unseeing at the ceiling. “So the main event, it’s probably going to kill lots of people. We’ll see more breakthroughs, more anti-breakthrough reaction.”

  “Big event, lots of bodies.” She shrugged. “That doesn’t exactly narrow it down. Chicago’s a big place. and it doesn’t even have to be here.”

  But that wasn’t right. “It has to be here. Because you said the first part was bloodying us. I think someone building this kind of horror-show would want the public to blame us. For not being able to stop it. That’s the biggest bang for their buck, and we can’t fail if it’s not here. But why does One Land want this? Revenge? It’s not like a mess here is going to make us back off and stop supporting the free Chinese states against what’s left of the People’s Republic of China.”

  Rei threw herself back into her chair. “Think like people who don’t care how many they have to kill to weaken their enemy. Being the reasonably peaceful, prosperous, stable place that it is, the United States doesn’t see as many breakthroughs as a lot of the rest of the world. Fewer disasters, manmade and natural, to make them in bunches.”

  “Pellegrini’s been working to change that, but okay . . .”

  “So how does the US stay ahead of the game, maintain its superior military breakthrough-weight?”

  “Immigrants! Refugees.”

  “Got it in one. And the US is one of the most attractive destinations for immigrating or fleeing breakthroughs because it’s got just about the most liberal breakthrough laws anywhere. What happens if that changes?”

  I slumped, resting my head in my hands. Another breakthrough inflicted mass-fatality event, this close to the California Quake, would hugely boost Humanity First and its fellow-travelers. It would probably push through the National Public Safety Act, and scared breakthroughs would listen to people like Dr. Pellegrini, who told them they were uniquely gifted and uniquely threatened. Hateful rhetoric and demagoguery would peak, there’d be demonstrations, riots, murders, everything we stood for would be lost in a tide of hate and fear.

  And from One Land’s long-game perspective it was all golden; we’d ignore the rest of the world to deal with our own problems, and the US would hardly be a safe-haven for the world’s dispossessed and refugees anymore.

  How many people would die?

  I looked up. “You said the first time, Johnny Cho cut out and canceled the op because of an intelligence leak. He knew you were coming for him. What if we use the same leak, now? Let him know an agent’s here and hunting him? Would he abort the op?”

  Rei shook her head. “No. Too much is in play, too many assets have been exposed. This time it’s happening.”

  But what was it? A False Flag Operation required a flag. Someone to pin the tragedy on. Someone the people targeted would believe could—

  “It’s still about the Ascendant.” I knew it as the words left my mouth. “The Wreckers are mixed into this, now, so Pellegrini’s doing a lot more than just boosting the breakthroughs Cho chooses for the op.”

  Kitsune was shaking her head again.

  “Pellegrini’s in the mix, but it’s more likely the event will be staged to look like a berserk lone-wolf breakthrough, something like what happened with your gravikinetic, only bigger. A lot bigger. The Ascendant would only be the flag if the first story is penetrated.”

  “Okay, so we provide Veritas with what we’ve guessed about Pellegrini’s intentions. I can tell him, truthfully, that I have credible intelligence that the Ascendant is going to stage another mass-death event. You said the leak is on the DSA end, so we don’t tell him about Johnny Cho. You go back to sneaking around. Find Cho.”

  Kitsune looked struck. “And even if that leaks, the most Johnny will know is someone is onto the Ascendant.” Her eyes sparkled. “Yes, this will work!” Jumping up, she leaned down to grab my face with both hands and lay an enthusiastic kiss on me before I had a chance to do more than laugh at her sudden good cheer. Dancing back, she pumped a fist in the air. “And it’s Jane Bond, now,” she laughed, heading for the door.

  “I’m gone sneaking. I’ll stay in touch with your ghost-girl bestie. And you, dear wife,” She turned back, the cheer dropping out of her voice, the set of her face making her look a lot older th
an a college-coed. “Go. Talk to the Man of Truth. But first talk to your father. I’m sure he’s still here.”

  And she was out the door and gone.

  “Well.” Shell appeared at my elbow. “Mrs. Kitsune Corrigan is interesting.”

  I laughed again. I liked Kitsune-Rei and would have liked to have met Rei for real. “Could you write up a threat-assessment we can pass to Veritas? Please? Tell him I have it from an absolutely trustworthy source that I absolutely can’t reveal, and I’ll see him in the morning. I’m going to go find Dad and then look at some armor.”

  * * *

  Shell told me right where Iron Jack was, which was in the Residence Level common room talking to Riptide and Seven. I said hi to everyone and asked if I could steal him for a few minutes—everyone else could just assume that, as the new field leader, I needed to discuss a few things with the activated reserve member. And I did.

  Shell sealed the kitchen door behind us before I stepped into my father’s much-needed hug. I always laughed a little about how Dad’s metal-man transformation condensed him down to my height, but his massive arms were even bigger than when he was flesh-and-blood, and his metal chest could take a tight hug from me. He didn’t even groan theatrically as I squeezed, just hugged me back hard.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “Blackstone’s dead.”

  His iron arms tightened as I finally let the tears go. I still had to go see Rush and Chakra. I had to review Blackstone’s files and notes. I had to speak to Fisher, Ambrosius, and Veritas. So much lay ahead of me I could only focus on the next thing. But right now, above all I needed my Dad. And something else. When a few wet, sniffley minutes later, I dried my eyes and accepted a last pat on the back, a light laugh tugged at the corner of my mouth.

  “Thanks, Dad. Um. There’s something you need to know.”

  “Something? Really.” His deep laugh warmed, loosening the knot inside me. We’d be alright.