All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault

by James Alan Gardner

  THE SPARKLES INSIDE THE PORTAL WENT BERSERK

  If the little flames were bees, then the rift was their hive. Somehow they knew it was threatened. Before Jools could pull the plug, the sparkles zoomed out in an angry swarm.

  As the flames entered our world, they expanded to globes of fire—still small, like ping-pong balls, but moving hard and fast. Hundreds of burning balls in hundreds of brilliant colors flew from the portal and attacked.

  The first wave of flame balls went for Jools. After that, the swarm must have decided we were all potential threats. The alien ping-pong bees broke into squadrons, one for each of us. They bore down in a rage, like furious stars.

  I threw up my arms to protect myself before they burned my eyes. It made no difference—the fireballs passed through my flesh. I felt no touch of contact, but their heat seared my skin and kept on moving. Fire blazed directly inside my forearms. I screamed and squeezed my eyes shut.

  Not that it did any good. Blinding flames forced through my eyelids. My eyeballs were replaced with scalding suns. The suns pressed onward, through my eye sockets and into my brain.

  PURE ANIMAL PAIN

  I hurt so badly, I couldn’t think. Obliteration.

  Yet something remained in my head: images plucked from my memories. They weren’t like normal imaginings, but full sound-and-color re-creations, as if I were actually reliving the past. The feeling of being shoved against a locker … insults yelled at me … getting frisked in a store while dozens of people watched, because someone thought a queer Asian kid had to be a shoplifter. The images flicked through pain after pain, each memory lasting less than a second. So many humiliations. So many bruises. The flame-bees invading my brain fast-forwarded through my life’s “worst of” album in search of rock bottom.

  Eureka: Memory found. Then relived, as if I were truly enduring it once more.

  I was Kimmi. My view was framed by ultra-black hair, much longer and heavier than my current brush cut.

  Kimmi stood in the Vandermeer home, in the study used by Nicholas’s sister, Elaine. Elaine was a vampire—all the Vandermeers were. Each had undergone the Dark Conversion alone, but for some reason, every last one of them had come out the other side as a vampire. “The Vandermeer Vamps,” Nicholas called them.

  This scene had happened the night after Nicholas decided to join them. After he sent me the email saying, I have to do this, Kimmi. Good-bye.

  Elaine sat behind her desk. She was a Darkling, but not “dark”: not a Goth like me. I wore a long black dress and corset under my black Chantilly blouse, but Elaine only wore black in the rims of her glasses. They made her look like an optician’s ad—one of those fashion models who look fabulous in glasses, but give the impression they never wear them in real life. Elaine didn’t need glasses; vampires can read four-point type in total darkness. But she wore them anyway, for the sake of gravitas. She also wore a white blouse with demure bits of frill, plus a tan jacket and skirt that were likely from a couturier so high-end I’d never heard of him.

  The room was bright, though unnatural shadows clustered in the corners. Anyplace where Darklings spend time begins to go dark. Paper withers. Spiders lurk.

  Elaine folded her hands on the desk. She looked me in the eye, with just enough vampire charisma that I couldn’t look away. “This isn’t a good idea, Kimmi. Talking to Nicholas would be awkward and embarrassing. Also futile.”

  When this had happened for real, I’d tried to protest. In this forced relived memory, I couldn’t speak. Trapped in the nightmare.

  Elaine continued, her voice softly reasonable. “Breaking up with you by email was inconsiderate.” She paused. “But at least it allowed him to choose his words carefully. Nicholas let you down as gently as he could. You were a training experience, nothing more. Our kind encourage that kind of play in adolescence, but when we reach adulthood, we put away childish things. He’ll tell you that himself if you confront him face-to-face. You can’t possibly change my brother’s mind, but things may become unpleasant. Surely you want to avoid that. Do you need to add to your pain?”

  I had argued, trying not to cry. But in this merciless reenactment, everything I did sped past in a blur. My mind clung to every word and gesture from Elaine but paid no attention to myself.

  Elaine didn’t blink, not once in the whole conversation. Her green eyes never took on the red that would indicate the use of vampiric power. She could have imposed her will on me; she could have made me her slave. But she didn’t. She simply waited and watched as I crumbled—as Kimmi, who had been so strong, shrank to nothing.

  When I’d finally shriveled completely, Elaine screwed down the lid of the coffin. She rose from her chair and came around the desk. She stood very close. “All right, Kimmi. All right.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “I’ll talk to Nicholas. I’ll ask if he’s willing to see you. I’ll tell him you’re desperate. That’s right, isn’t it? You’re desperate?”

  I said yes.

  “It might make a better impression if you prove how desperate you are.”

  I said I’d do anything.

  SHE WANTED BLOOD; OF COURSE SHE DID

  I wasn’t stupid. I could see how things would go. I would let Elaine drink; then either she’d laugh and call a servant to throw me out, or else she’d leave and come back a few minutes later, saying how sorry she was, but Nicholas refused to see me.

  She wouldn’t help. I knew that. But I still said yes. Maybe I hoped she’d kill me.

  That’s basically what happened. Elaine, almost clinically, took Kimmi in her arms and ended Kimmi’s life. Not literally—a living body remained, with only a modest sip of blood actually removed. She didn’t even drink from my neck; once she had me in her grip, she asked me to lift my arm, pull back the sleeve, and put my skin to her mouth.

  She bit. She drank. Afterward, she wiped her lips.

  Nothing illegal happened. Nothing detectable. But the Kimmi in me died with Elaine’s teeth sunk in my arm. After Nicholas’s cold “It’s over,” this was the last nail in Kimmi’s coffin.

  I wasn’t actually dead. This is all just metaphor.

  But it didn’t feel that way.

  THAT WAS HOW IT WENT IN REAL LIFE

  Now, the alien fireballs in my brain made me relive it. Begging Elaine to help me. Offering what she wanted.

  But this time when I spoke, my words had no sound. I could feel my lips move, but all I heard was the rustle of Elaine’s clothing, and her footsteps on the carpet as she walked toward me. Inside, I was already weeping. I knew what was coming, and everything in my soul yearned for a way to stop it.

  Suddenly, I wasn’t in my head anymore. I saw the scene from above, as if floating on the ceiling of Elaine’s study. I’d escaped the pain as well; whatever the flames were doing inside my brain, I’d broken free into a safe bolt-hole.

  Perhaps I was dead. I might have truly died, there in that lab, there in that dream. Or maybe astral projection isn’t just for Darklings and Sparks; maybe ordinary people can do it under extraordinary conditions. One way or another, I floated above the scene. I saw myself start to cry. I saw Elaine reach out to take me.

  And my disembodied self said, “No.”

  WHEN DO WE EVER GET SECOND CHANCES? WHY THE HELL WAS I WASTING THIS ONE?

  I swam through the air, back into my body. My consciousness slipped into place and locked home.

  I silenced my former self. I cut off her pleading, “Just bite me, then go get Nicholas.” It took all my effort, like doing one more push-up when you have nothing left … but I said to Elaine, “Get fucked. This is over.”

  I planned to walk out the door. Before I could do that, the scene shattered into a million pieces.

  I FOUND MYSELF BACK IN THE LAB

  Had it just been an illusion? Or honest-to-goodness time travel? I didn’t know. In a world with magic and superpowers, reality gets hard to pin down.

  All around me, multicolored flame balls still swarmed like angry bees, but they no longe
r affected me. Dozens shoved against my arms and face but couldn’t get in. They didn’t burn my skin. Their light didn’t even hurt my eyes, despite intense flares right in front of my pupils.

  Bees? No. Now they were just fruit flies. I waved them aside.

  Miranda and Shar stood exactly where they’d been. They were cringing, surrounded by their own furious fireballs. Teardrops ran down their cheeks. I wanted to snap them out of whatever they might be reliving, but before I could move, the portal gave another thunderous pulse.

  The rift had grown gigantic since I’d last seen it. Now it spanned half the width of the lab and reached so high that I couldn’t see how much of it extended out through the building’s roof. With another few pulses, the gash in reality would engulf the whole room, and swallow us with it.

  I ran behind the rift. Its rear surface was opaque and swirling with colors, like the sheen of oil on water. A cone of light shone out of the darkness, feeding into the back of the portal, just as Jools had said—like a movie projector illuminating a screen. I could easily follow the cone backward to its source. I did so, staying out of the light.

  I almost tripped over Jools.

  SHE LAY ON THE FLOOR IN FETAL POSITION

  The coppery gas enveloped her. Every breath she took was a wheeze, filling her lungs with poison. I wanted to lift her out of the mist, but I knew I wasn’t strong enough. Unplug the machine, I told myself; that was the best way to save her.

  I continued to follow the cone of light until I reached the portal projector. It was the size of a fridge, but made from a transparent crystal material that reflected the light swirling on the back of the rift. Inside the crystal case were a host of components that looked like mock-ups from a Saturday morning kids’ show: a lemon wired up with the old penny-and-nail trick; a brain, upside down, in a jar of murky liquid (yellow-green, like water in an aquarium that’s lost the battle with algae); a ray gun clutched by a robot hand that repeatedly pulled the trigger. And those were only the first items to catch my eye. Other, maybe stranger components lay deeper within the machine’s guts.

  I knew a Mad Genius machine when I saw one. This was Cape Tech created by a Spark so supersmart he or she had gone insane from cosmic “insights.” Or perhaps the people who became Mad Geniuses were crazy to begin with—the Light played no favorites with the people it made super, giving powers to both the sane and the deranged. Perhaps unbalanced minds were especially suited for hyper IQs; the world had a disproportionate number of Mad Geniuses compared to more run-of-the-mill supervillains.

  But however unhinged the machine’s technology was, its power supply was conventional. A heavy-duty cable ran out the machine’s back, connecting it to an outlet in the wall. The plug was the size of a loaf of bread, made of surprisingly slippery plastic. I had to take off my gloves and use my bare hands to get a grip on it. I grabbed the plug, planted my foot against the wall, and played tug-of-war until the connection grudgingly yielded.

  The plug came out. For a moment, nothing happened. Then something went CHUNK inside the projector.

  AT THAT INSTANT, MIRANDA LET LOOSE A SCREAM

  It was a cry that could only have been made by an opera singer. The fireball-bees, still swarming around me, jolted as if struck by mallets.

  The portal began to close: no thudding percussion, just slow diminution, like a tire deflating. Still, it sent the flaming ping-pong balls into a panic. The ones near my face abandoned me and sped to Jools, doubling the crowd around her. Hundreds burrowed into her body like scavenger insects invading a carcass.

  From the other side of the rift, Miranda called, “Can anybody hear me?”

  I sighed with relief. Miranda hadn’t screamed because she was hurt—she’d broken free. “People heard you in Australia,” I said. “But welcome back. How are you feeling?”

  “I’ll live. But Shar’s still surrounded by fire things. A bunch are inside her.”

  “Jools too,” I said. “But I unplugged the machine that kept the portal open. The rift is shrinking now. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Fine. I’ll deal with Shar. Can you drag Jools to the door?”

  “Sure,” I said, hoping it was true.

  I TURNED MY ATTENTION TO JOOLS

  She lay on the floor, submerged in coppery fumes and wheezing like she ought to be in an oxygen tent. Ping-pong fireballs whizzed frantically through her, as if they knew the rift was closing and their time was growing short. Each ball had a different color, so I could track when one shoved into her eye socket and when the same one came out the back of her skull. I put my hand over her eyes, but it made little difference—the flames didn’t seem able to pass through my hand anymore, but they could go around, zipping into Jools’s ears, her temples, or under her chin, flying so quickly I couldn’t block them fast enough.

  Forget it, I told myself. Just get Jools outside.

  I tucked my hands under her armpits and tried to drag her. She barely budged. I thought of all the times Jools had told me, “Shut your damned books and get some exercise.” Other times when Miranda had invited me to go to yoga. And even Shar went to the gym on occasion—she always said, “If I’m going to be big, I might as well pump iron.”

  So, yeah, I thought, I’m a weakling by choice. That made me angry enough to heave harder. Jools started to move.

  Jools wasn’t bulky like Shar, but she was no lightweight. Wispy girls can’t give and take body checks, or skate at high speeds in ungainly hockey equipment. As I struggled to keep her in motion, I muttered, “Come on, Jools, wake up. Whatever the fireballs are doing inside your head, Miranda and I got past it. She’ll never let you live it down if you don’t beat it too.”

  It made me wonder what Jools was seeing. Did all of us have awful memories like mine with Elaine? If the fireballs couldn’t find anything bad enough, would they invent some experience so dire you went catatonic? I didn’t know, and I had no intention of asking my roommates what they’d gone through. They might actually tell me. Then they’d ask me the same question.

  “Jools!” I snapped. “Wake up! You’re late for practice. Wayne Gretzky will be at the rink. And beer: free beer.”

  Jools’s eyes snapped open. “What? Oh, fuck, that really sucked.” Her voice was so hoarse I could barely hear her.

  JOOLS’S BEVY OF FIREBALLS ROSE UP IN A BLAZING CLOUD

  They shot toward the portal, abruptly desperate to get back home before the rift closed. I watched them zip across the threshold, then Jools started coughing, as if her lungs were trying to escape through her windpipe. She was still on the floor, still breathing the gas. Now that she wasn’t completely deadweight, I wrapped my arms around her chest and tried to raise her head above the vapors.

  After a moment, Jools swallowed her coughs enough to stagger to her feet with my help. Our heights were too different for her to drape an arm around my shoulders, but she leaned against me as I got one arm around her waist and started walking her toward the door.

  Behind us, the portal continued to shrink, emitting less and less of its rusty brown light. The lab darkened; with the blinder wall still in place all around the room’s perimeter, I wasn’t sure where the exit was. The rift began rumbling with the same drumlike thuds I’d heard before, but now in a continuous roll that made my heart feel like it was fibrillating.

  I turned my head for one last look at the Darklings, still on the portal’s other side. They seemed peaceful, despite being mobbed by sparkles. Perhaps inside the rift, the fireball-bees gave you happy dreams instead of traumatic ones. I hoped so, because it looked like the Darklings might be locked in the rift universe forever.

  I told myself, It’s what they chose. I kept heading for the door.

  MIRANDA AND SHAR CONVERGED WITH US

  Shar was awake. She and Miranda walked with their arms around each other’s shoulders, like drunks propping themselves up. “How are you doing?” I asked.

  “Fucking awesome,” Miranda growled.

  “I’m surprisingly well,” S
har said.

  “You puked on my shoes,” Miranda told her.

  “And now I feel cleansed,” Shar said. “I had a terrible dream, but I—”

  Her voice cut off as she and Miranda stepped into the blinder wall. I hoped they were in the right spot to go through the door; with the light fading, it was hard to orient myself. The portal had shrunk to a rusty sliver, and the only other illumination came from stars shining through the broken roof. I gritted my teeth and moved forward, wondering what would happen if I hit the lab’s wall rather than the doorway. Would I get trapped in the blinder, unable to move or think?

  At the very last instant before we entered the blinder, Jools gave a sideways tug to correct my course. I didn’t resist, despite doubting that Jools’s sense of direction was any better than mine.

  We came out safely on the other side, just brushing the doorframe. I didn’t want to think about how I would have ended up without Jools.

  Half a second later, the room exploded behind us.

  THE SHOCK WAVE THREW US FORWARD

  We were tossed across the corridor and into the opposite wall. Hard. But we were lucky—the blinder wall suppressed much of the explosion’s force, or we might have been flattened to paste. The blinder itself didn’t survive the blast. I don’t know if it popped like a bubble or ripped into tatters, but by the time we struggled to our feet, the wall of blackness was gone.

  So was any good evidence of what had happened in the lab. One glance through the door showed an unholy mess. All the time I’d been inside, I hadn’t examined the lab in detail—the big, glowing portal had monopolized my attention, and the gas obscured everything else. Now I just saw chaos: papers scattered and burning, machinery blown to pieces, tables and chairs knocked helter-skelter.

  Had the closing of the portal caused this devastation? Or had the Darklings planted a bomb to destroy the evidence, keyed to detonate if the portal disappeared?

  The wreckage looked worse where the rift projector had stood. According to rumor, Mad Genius tech had a habit of obliterating itself—partly so no one could copy it, partly to hide that it was ever there, and partly because the stuff was so damned unstable it could blow up spontaneously like nitroglycerin past its best-before date.