Yesterday's Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  Shaw holds up three fingers, then two, then—

  I move before she finishes the countdown. There is no way I’m going to let this wizard cow put holes in Felicity Shaw. I vault the wall. It’s not a maneuver that’s going to win me an Olympic gold, but I keep my gun arm free. I sweep the pistol along the length of the raised platform.

  I point it at nothing. At no one.

  “Shit!” Shaw, snapping around the corner, curses at the empty platform. She scans back and forth. There’s just one door. One route away from here, easily taken in the confusion. Shaw points to it. We start running.

  The door flies open onto a corridor. More display cases line the walls. The stocky woman stands beside one. She has bad skin, bad teeth, and a bad perm. She looks a little like my mother. Admittedly my mother’s left jaw, shoulder, arm, and side aren’t encased in metal, but it’s still a little embarrassing that she’s the one who’s been handing us our arses so tidily.

  The woman raises a hand. Sheets of steel shift with an electronic hiss. Engines whine. She extends the hand protruding from the metal arm. A ring of LEDs shine blue and bright around her wrist. With a quick movement she smashes a glass case. She grabs something large and silver—a sizable chunk of metal or mineral—off a velvet board.

  “Put it down,” I say.

  Shaw points her pistol. I mirror her movements.

  The woman starts shouting, defiant. But I don’t start understanding. The language sounds familiar, though. Something eastern European? Russian perhaps?

  Shaw cocks the hammer on her pistol. “He said put it down, you Russian bitch.”

  So, definitely Russian then.

  The woman laughs at us.

  “I’m warning you,” Shaw says, but perhaps not loud enough to expect to be heard.

  Lightning arcs out of the wall. Shaw yells, fires. But she’s not as fast as the Russian woman. The bullet whips through a white electric blur, slams into the wall. The corridor is abruptly empty.

  Another electric blue-white light flashes from through an archway to the right.

  “Fuck!” Shaw yells.

  I’m already running past her. I skid at the archway, bunch my knees ready to put on another spurt of speed—

  It’s a little dead-end room, an alcove with dreams of grandeur. It holds a great carved rock, a few spotlights, some poorly chosen wallpaper. And no Russians at all.

  Shaw joins me, pistol still pointing. She thrusts it at empty space. We stare at each other. There was nowhere for the Russian to go and she’s totally gone.

  SIX

  “Oh. My. God.”

  I sit on the floor next to Shaw, my head on her shoulder. My hands are still shaking.

  “Just, like, wow.”

  Clyde seems unable to sit. He keeps glancing over at us, shrugging and turning away awkwardly. We seem to be making him uncomfortable. Right now I’m willing to be selfish.

  “I mean, just like, totally…”

  Tabitha strolls up through the devastated minerals display, her laptop held under her arm. She gives Shaw and I a look that lies somewhere between disgust and admiration. Kayla falls into sullen line behind her.

  “This is so completely awesome!” the blonde girl squeals. “There’s totally more of you.”

  “Jaz,” says the large black man. He has the assault rifle slung over his shoulder. “Jasmine.” He speaks calm and slow.

  The girl ignores him as he approaches, staring wild-eyed at Tabitha, who looks back as if she’s just discovered an all-singing, all-dancing turd.

  “Jasmine.” The man lays a large hand on the girl’s shoulder. She looks up in surprise. “Calm down,” he says in the same slow way.

  “But… But… Didn’t you see? They…”

  He stares at her, impassive.

  “You’re totally oozing over this one and you know it,” she tells him. “This is totally emotional repression on your part.”

  “I’m squee-ing on the inside,” the big man deadpans. He nods his head in miniature greeting. “Malcolm West,” he says. “This is Jasmine.”

  “Hi!” Jasmine pips, bouncing on her toes.

  “Hello,” I say, raising my hand. “I’m Arthur.”

  “Awesome,” breathes Jasmine.

  The Asian woman stops pulling bits of plaster out of her hair and looks up at me. “Aiko.” She smiles. “We already met.”

  “Agent Arthur Wallace,” I say, smiling.

  No one else from MI37 says anything. It seems a little unfriendly. I’m fairly sure we were all just fighting the same giant slavering T-Rex.

  “So, how did you guys—” I start.

  By my shoulder, Shaw clucks her tongue. I glance at her.

  “The British government,” she says, not looking directly at me or the strangers, “does not recognize the Weekenders as a legitimate militia group. They do not endorse their activities. Its members are not privy to documents or information protected by the Official Secrets Act. They have not received any form of government-approved training.” The man, Malcolm, grunts at that. “Their possession of firearms is illegal, and it is the duty of British officials to hunt them down and arrest them before they harm others or themselves.”

  She rolls her head to look up at me.

  “Wait… We have to arrest them?” It seems like a pretty shitty way to treat them. “That’s not right.”

  Shaw looks back at them, the Weekenders. Aiko shrugs at us.

  “Maybe later,” Shaw says. “I’m tired and I need a shower.” She stands slowly, stretches, grimacing. “Come on, let’s get out of here.” She takes a step, then looks back at the Weekenders. “You are going to get yourselves killed. Maybe you’re going to get us killed.”

  I’m going to give Shaw the benefit of the doubt and assume she’s still pissed about the middle-aged Russian woman making us look stupid in front of an audience. That’s no fun for anyone.

  “Next time,” Shaw continues, “I will arrest you before I even bother taking on the threat. For your sakes. For ours.” She shakes her head. “Bloody amateurs.”

  I don’t want to totally break rank, and Shaw’s made the official MI37 line pretty clear, but I would like to soften the blow if I can. I try to take everything that Clyde has taught me since joining the department, and I shrug apologetically at Aiko.

  She sneaks me a grin when Shaw isn’t looking.

  We file out. Shaw and I lead, Clyde and Tabitha hand-in-hand behind us, Kayla at the rear. Unfortunately there’s only one real way out of the building, so the Weekenders walk with us. Everyone seems to be rather pointedly ignoring each other.

  Almost everyone.

  “Is that, like, a real real sword?” I hear the girl Jasmine ask Kayla.

  Considering Kayla doesn’t gut the girl, I imagine that an exploding T-Rex hasn’t cheered her up any.

  Aiko falls into step with Shaw and I. “So,” she says, “what did the Russian grab?” She gives me a cheeky grin.

  My eyebrows bounce up.

  “I mean,” she goes on, “at first, I had it pegged as a pretty basic heist. Use the animated T-Rex to clear out mundane security, then use the window until the specialists arrive,” she nods to me and the rest of MI37, “to go for the precious stones, etc. But then,” she knits her eyebrows, “she goes for minerals and takes her sweet time getting there. And it also strikes me that maybe a T-Rex is a bit flashy. I mean, if she knew her stuff, and she surely seemed to, she could have swiped some jewels and been out of here without anyone blinking. But, like I said, she didn’t even go for jewels. So what did she swipe? What did she want you to see?”

  For an amateur, that strikes me as pretty bloody good detective work.

  “You on the police force?” I ask on instinct. Shaw clucks quietly.

  “I teach first-grade,” Aiko says. “It gives me profound insight into the way twisted minds work.”

  I can’t help but chuckle.

  “I believe I mentioned that you’re not privy to information covered by the Official
Secrets Act, didn’t I?” Shaw says to her.

  I stop chuckling.

  At the entrance hall, Aiko says, “Probably better to go our own way from here.” She gives me a friendly wave. Shaw is quasi-glaring at me. I leave off returning the wave. Maybe it’s time to prioritize the women in my life and follow Shaw’s lead.

  The 2:34 from London to Oxford

  Rain graffitis the train window. Shaw and I are alone again, Tabitha and Clyde opting for the intimacy of Clyde’s Mini, and Kayla opting for solitude.

  Shaw’s been quiet since we left the museum, wrapped up in herself. She hasn’t even chewed me out for the being-good-in-bed joke. That might be a good sign, but on the other hand my subsequent attempts at witty banter have been met with the same polite nods most people reserve for village idiots.

  As Reading rattles past our windows, she finally looks up at me.

  “We didn’t do very well there, did we?” she says. She looks anxious, small in her suit. Very un-Shaw-like.

  It’s technically true, but I’m still feeling pretty buoyant about yesterday’s world-saving and today’s more explosive moments, so I say, “We blew up a zombie T-Rex. I think that was why we went there.”

  “But the Russian who summoned it got away, didn’t she?” Shaw says. “We failed our primary objective, and she achieved hers. She stole whatever she was looking to steal. One woman defeated us. All five of us.”

  “Cheer up,” I say, laying a hand on hers as I avoid the specifics of the argument. “We saved the world yesterday.”

  Shaw looks out the window and then back. She’s smiling but there’s no humor to it. “But don’t you think,” she says, “that maybe we shouldn’t have let it get that far? Shouldn’t we have stopped things before anyone needed to save the world?”

  Which is a tricky question. Because of course we should. But—

  “Nobody else was trying,” I say. “Without us there wouldn’t even have been an eleventh-hour victory. Just no victory at all.”

  “Hmmm,” Shaw says. I’m not sure I’ve convinced her. There again, I’m not entirely sure I convinced myself.

  SEVEN

  MI37 headquarters, Oxford

  Conference room B has changed in some indefinable yet profound way. Without losing its plastic chairs, or its cheap vinyl veneer-covered table, it has somehow become comfortable. The environs of MI37 have become reassuring. I think something might be wrong with me.

  Shaw sits at the head of the table, once more the woman in full command.

  “First impressions?” she says.

  “Theft,” Tabitha says, without taking a beat. “Get us all excited about the T-Rex. Nab rock. Scarper.”

  Shaw nods. But, something feels odd about that assessment to me. I remember what the Weekender, Aiko, said as we left the museum.

  “This T-Rex,” I say, “wasn’t it the opposite of a distraction? Didn’t it draw attention to the theft rather than away from it?”

  Shaw appears to weigh this. “Care to expand on that?”

  “It’s just,” I say, “this Russian woman is a magician, so a zombie T-Rex seems like overkill for just doing some thieving. Why not a more surreptitious route? Just teleport the stone out of there or something?”

  “Can’t teleport,” Tabitha interjects.

  “What?”

  “Teleportation,” Clyde says, “magico-physical impossibility.”

  “Really?” I’m kind of surprised to find out that there are things that are still impossible.

  “Oh yes,” Clyde nods enthusiastically.

  He’s about to slap me with magical theory, I realize. I brace for impact.

  “You see,” Clyde says, “I think we’ve established that magic works when human will, shaped by specific syllabic constructs, or spells, powered by electricity, punches a hole out of our reality and into another one.”

  He’s building up, relying on lessons taught before, but I’ve been trying to avoid the specifics of magic and let all the other “what-the-fuck” percolate. I wrestle my way through memory to the specifics. There are multiple realities. Magic involves reaching out of our reality. Punching a hole, Clyde calls it. And you need electricity for it. The universal lubricant. Not the nicest term. But apparently it’s using electricity that stops the whole project from going boom in the spell caster’s face.

  “So, the magician, or whatever,” Clyde continues, “reaches out of our reality, and into another one. And he or she pulls something out of the distant reality through the hole and into our world. For example, an animating force that they want to slap into a T-Rex skeleton, or maybe some kinetic force that they want to use to cave in that T-Rex’s skull. Theoretically simplistic if a little tricky in practice.”

  I nod. “You told me all this.” Which is my polite way of saying, “I remember you gibbering all this at me once before.”

  “Well,” Clyde says, “teleporting, that’s passing instantly from one place in one reality to another place in the same reality. Which you know. Of course. Definitional. But it’s important. You want to tear a hole in one part of reality, and step out of another hole in the same place you punched out of. Can’t do it. When you punch out, you’re punching out.

  “I mean, say, for example, you’re in a paper bag. Not a likely scenario, I realize, but imagine, attack of the giant paper bags. Swallows you whole. Oh no. Need to punch your way out. So you punch. Easy job really. It’s only a paper bag. One reason paper bags will never take over the world, I assume. Anyway, when you punch out of the bag, you punch out into whatever environment is surrounding the bag. You don’t punch back into the bag.”

  I knew it was going to happen. I’ve gone cross-eyed.

  “Intradimensional magic,” Tabitha chimes in, just to baffle me more. “Name for it. People tried it. Remember Chernobyl?”

  More memory wrestling. And I’m surprised to find I actually do remember this discussion. I’m quite pleased with myself.

  “Chernobyl wasn’t a nuclear explosion,” I say, dredging the brain trenches. “It was experimental magic gone awry. The Magical Arms Race. It was ballsy communist wizards trying to experiment. To pioneer their own spells.”

  “Indeed.” Tabitha nods. “Intradimensional magic. Them. Trying it. Wanted to get a nuke into Times Square. Some such. Instead blew bits of themselves around the place.”

  “Alright,” I say. “No teleporting.” I think that sums up their point.

  “But,” Shaw says, finally pulling us back to the discussion at hand, “Arthur, you’re basically saying this woman wanted us at the museum?” She’s not dismissive, merely curious.

  “I’m saying if she didn’t, she did a piss-poor job of keeping us away.” I’m pretty sure I’m right, but what experience I’ve had in the supernatural world has taught me to avoid something as simple as a straight “yes.”

  “I’ll buy that,” Shaw says, pushing back in her chair. “But then why did she want us there?”

  I try to think. “What if the point was just to impress us with what she’s capable of. Territorial pissing?”

  “Not really a message. That.” Tabitha looks irritated, I’m not sure if it’s at my argument or at the world for not shriveling up in self-hatred yet.

  “Indeed.” Shaw nods along with Tabitha.

  “Did she say anything?” Clyde asks.

  I think about that. “Yes.” I nod. “Well, at the end she shouted angrily and tried to scare me with magic.” I look at Shaw. “You said it was Russian?”

  I understood a few words.” Shaw looks suddenly worried again. It’s not wholly reassuring. “Here and there.” She lapses into silence.

  “Any examples?” I ask once it becomes apparent that no one else is going to leap in. Apparently if you sleep with the boss then you get to ask her the hard questions.

  Shaw grimaces. “What I understood was, ‘time,’ ‘we will,’ and ‘bomb.’”

  “Bomb?” My eyes widen. I don’t disbelieve her. I just want to.

  “Yes.”
/>
  There’s silence in the room.

  “Ballsy Russian,” Tabitha says finally. “With a bomb. Or wants a bomb. Or needs a part for a bomb. Wants us to know about it.”

  Not the prettiest picture anyone’s ever painted for me. And while we did save the world, this Russian woman didn’t make us look exactly like we operate in the world-saving league. Having seen her with magic, I’m not sure I want to see her with a bomb.

  “I just want to check,” I say, “but it’s still a no on the days off, isn’t it?”

  EIGHT

  Shaw doesn’t reply, so I decide to pressure test the new bomb hypothesis for holes. I find one, but not one I expected. “We said she can’t teleport, right?”

  “In detail.” Shaw is rubbing her temples.

  “So how did she get away?” I ask. “We had her in our sights. Then she wasn’t there.”

  “Glamour,” Clyde says. “Illusion magic. The same sort that was used on the T-Rex. The magical and mysterious art of making something appear where it isn’t. Not stage magician sleight of hand, obviously. But it has that same sort of underhand sneaky feel that leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Of course, your opinion of illusionists might depend on how badly disappointed you were by Dynamic Dave, Master of Seven Deadliest Illusions on your eighth birthday.” He catches himself, and shrugs twice. “Anyway we were talking about glamour magic. Totally going to stick to that. Basically, duping people. Obviously that’s simplifying it quite a lot. Visual distortions is closer. Bending light is closer. Summoning refractory space from other realities is almost nail on the head.”

  “Oh,” I say. It’s actually kind of flattering that this Russian woman seems to be going so far out of her way to impress us.

  “Well,” Shaw puts both palms down on the table, “whatever her motives with the T-Rex were, we do know for sure that she stole that stone. What’s so special about it? Can it help her make a bomb? Tabitha, I want you on that.” She pushes back a stray lock of hair. “Now, Clyde—”