All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault

by James Alan Gardner

  Zircon shut down. It just let go. My omnimorphic field sputtered out like a lie and I exploded back up to fleshly height.

  I didn’t even feel my head hit the Bride under the chin. The pounding in my skull overrode other sensations. But a moment after that uppercut, all my pain went away—everything but the sudden ache at the top of my skull, in exactly the same spot where I’d slammed Jools an hour earlier.

  Spark-o-Vision returned with a rush, showing the Bride starting to topple. She and I briefly stood face-to-face: both of us in white, her in her veil and gown, me in my suit, as if we were newlyweds. With Spark-o-Vision, I could see the two of us looking like the decoration on a wedding cake.

  Then the Bride slumped, unconscious. She began to strobe and vibrate. I said, “Shit,” and started to shrink.

  I HAD ONLY GOTTEN DOWN TO BARBIE SIZE WHEN THE BRIDE EXPLODED

  Barbie-me nearly got blown through the rift. I missed the edge of the opening by a hairsbreadth, soaring so close that the wind of my passing sent vortices roiling through the rift’s vapor. Fireball-bees swarmed toward me, but then I was past the hole, still riding the blast of the Bride’s destruction.

  I slammed into the Market’s wall, making one of those person-shaped holes so popular in cartoons. Even with the hardness of a zircon, I got the breath hammered out of me.

  For a moment, I stayed embedded in my silhouette. The pause gave me time to see what was happening throughout the building.

  Ninety-Nine had been carrying someone over her shoulders in a fireman’s lift. She was dozens of paces away from the blast, but she still got hurled backward into a rack of half-burnt clothes. The clothes were surrounded by a heat haze of magical energy.

  Aria and the bogeyman sprawled in a tangled heap. She’d been standing near the rift, and the bogeyman had taken the bait. He’d been lurking invisibly behind her back. When the Bride exploded, it took him by surprise. He’d become visible as the explosion knocked him off his feet.

  Aria’s force field flickered weakly, nearly destroyed by the Bride’s explosion. The bogeyman was also flickering: light, dark, light, dark …

  Overhead, timbers groaned.

  I screamed, “Everybody, run!”

  In my squeaky, Barbie-doll voice.

  Which only Aria heard.

  ARIA BOLTED

  Reflexes as fast as the speed of sound. With more-than-human strength, she shoved the bogeyman off her. Not wasting the time to get to her feet, she flew straight off the ground and shot toward Ninety-Nine. A quick grab, like an osprey snatching a fish from a stream, then the two of them shot through the hole in the wall that Aria had bashed out earlier.

  Just in time. The bogeyman exploded. The roof came crashing down.

  THE MARKET COLLAPSED IN A ROAR OF SPLINTERED LUMBER

  Magical merchandise, Darklings, and humans were crushed under heavy fir crossbeams. I was caught in the collapse myself, still embedded in the wall. But I had just enough time to shrink to a sand grain. Like the ancient zircons that had survived four billion years, I remained intact while everything around me went to hell.

  Crashing. Screams. Crunches. Wet sounds.

  After the slaughter fell silent, I clambered up through debris and grew a little, using my vision to plot an insect-sized path through the shattered wood. I took to the air, wafting slowly over the carnage: blood and smashed bones protruding from flesh. Fires continued to smolder.

  The upper half of the stairway had been destroyed, but the lower half was still intact. Falling timbers had hit the steps and rolled downward, leaving a patch of stairs exposed. Elaine Vandermeer lay half in, half out of that patch, her lower body smashed but her face perfectly untouched. A splinter of wood had driven itself through her chest. It must have been propelled by the explosion, on a flawless trajectory to impale her through the heart.

  She was very dead.

  The person I hated most in the world, killed by a fluke of bad luck.

  But in a way, I was the one who’d killed her. I’d hit the Bride, and the Bride had blasted the bogeyman. He’d taken down the building.

  I had killed my greatest enemy. Revenge. Triumph.

  Dozens of other Darklings had died as well. Also, their human servants. I should have been happy, overjoyed. The only good Darkling is a …

  Wait. What?

  I looked down again at Elaine. Her face was twisted in pain.

  Of course I’d had revenge fantasies, but never this. I’d dreamt of getting her arrested … of Nicholas discovering what she’d done and having her expelled from the family … of Elaine going bankrupt, being sent to jail, and realizing how awful she’d been.

  But I’d never thought of killing her. The sight of it made me sick.

  I grew back to full size and stood over Elaine in the silence of the fallen building. Some people said a staked vampire could come back to life if the stake was removed. I reached down and pulled.

  SOMETHING BROKE; MY MIND CLEARED

  I was back in the Market. The building was damaged, but still standing. Nothing had changed since the moment the headache had stabbed into my brain.

  My Spark-o-Vision was still blind. My real eyes could barely see in the darkness. The only light came from fires, and from the ever-growing rift.

  My size: small enough to float without falling. I’d barely moved since the Bride had attacked my mind. For a moment, I didn’t understand how I’d flipped back in time. Then I realized how many far-fetched flukes had given me my “victory” over Elaine.

  It had all been a delusion: an extended power fantasy compressed into a heartbeat.

  A SHRIEK PIERCED MY HEAD

  «You rejected my gift!»

  The voice sounded like violin strings scraped by a badly held bow. The scraping shaped into words, conveying rage maddened by pain: a wounded animal lashing out because it couldn’t find a way to stop hurting.

  The Bride stared straight at me, even though I was so small I ought to have been invisible.

  I said, “A hallucination isn’t a gift. And what you created was ugly.”

  I was far too small for my voice to be heard, but the Bride had her claws hooked into my brain. «You should be happy,» she transmitted. «You should be lost forever in the dream.»

  “How could I be happy about killing people?”

  «Happiness comes from winning.»

  “If you’re a lion with a thorn in your paw, you can’t make the pain go away by killing the thorn bush. You have to pull out the thorn.”

  «You’re wrong,» said the Bride. «I give happiness. Happiness comes from winning.»

  Her voice still sounded like a scraped violin, as if trying to make music by brute force. The other Darklings from the rift had been bestially insane; the Bride was on the edge of madness too, but she retained a sliver of self-control. Perhaps having psionic powers gave her greater mental strength. If I kept her talking and I said the right things, maybe she could keep a grip.

  “The dream you gave me,” I said. “Is that new? A power from the rift?”

  «I give dreams of happiness. All wishes made true. All foes destroyed.»

  I grimaced. I didn’t give a damn about destroying my foes. My actual daydreams were embarrassingly conventional: finding a place I fit; loving someone who loved me back; becoming the most brilliant, most respected geologist of the twenty-first century.

  But the Bride was a demon. Her fantasies wouldn’t be so sunny.

  “The rift gave your companions superpowers,” I said. “Did you get some too?”

  «I’m using my powers now,» the Bride said. «Before, I could only give visions. Now I can transmit and receive.»

  “Then receive this,” I said. “Happiness. Better happiness.”

  I WAS NO SHINING BEACON OF CONTENTMENT

  I wasn’t one of those sages Grandma Lam loves to talk about. I didn’t do serenity, meditation, or ink-brush calligraphy, and I didn’t plan on a life of celibacy. Believe me, I was (and am) messed up in the usual ways.
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  But I knew the happiness of reading that expanded my mind.

  I knew Cherry Garcia ice cream.

  I knew laughing to myself when someone obviously couldn’t tell what sex I was. I knew the warmth of smiling at other people who’d received the same kind of stares, even if the reason we got those stares was completely different.

  I knew breathtaking photos and viral videos. I knew xkcd, and hugging big dogs, and saying, “This, this, this!” when a tweet stated the absolute truth.

  I knew hiking in the mountains. Seeing a fold in a wall of rock and understanding how it was made. Peering through a hand lens and finding itty-bitty garnets embedded in a stone that had previously seemed bland.

  The right music at the right time. Sometimes the wrong music too. Looking at myself in the mirror just after coloring my hair and thinking, Whoa.

  Shar’s cookies. Miranda singing for the joy of it. Jools telling stories about partying with her hockey team, featuring crazy bad behavior I would never indulge in myself but loved to experience vicariously.

  And Nicholas. Despite everything, there had been so many magical times when Nicholas and Kimmi were happy. I remembered those times clearly, even if they happened to a pair of people who were now both dead.

  I sent all those memories to the Bride. I hoped she’d find them calming. Maybe they could ease her gnawing madness.

  How could I have known it would be lethal?

  SCRAPED VIOLIN STRINGS: A SCREECH, A SQUEAL, A HOWL

  «Why have you made me remember?»

  Keening: a word we all know, but a noise we seldom hear. The sound of a grief so bitter, it pulls a cry from the soul.

  If Darklings even have souls. That’s what the keening was about.

  How much did the Dark Conversion kill? For vampires, it definitely killed the physical body. They didn’t breathe and their hearts didn’t beat. For other Darklings, it might be worse—like Skinless, the strangler skeleton, with no heart or lungs at all. Embers of life persisted, remnants of the original personality. But what about the soul? If such a thing existed, did Darklings have one? Or were they just dead inside?

  They claimed to be as human as any mortal. But spend enough time in their company and you saw worrisome characteristics: extreme self-centeredness, lack of softer emotions, indifference to “the herd of hoi polloi.” I had wondered if such traits just came from their upbringing—“the rich are different” has a history as long as the human race. But Nicholas had been raised that way too, and before he Converted, humanity had burned inside him like a supernova.

  I hadn’t seen enough of the new Nicholas to know how much was left. And I didn’t know the Bride at all. Had she really thought happiness was synonymous with hurting those you hated? Did nothing else lift her spirits?

  The Bride’s new superpowers let her feel what she’d been missing. The reminders I’d sent her: not momentous thrills but everyday pleasures.

  They stabbed her like a stake. The Bride’s psychic powers had linked my mind with hers. I felt her grief as she realized what she’d lost.

  She didn’t vibrate or strobe. The Bride didn’t die because Light and Dark energies warred inside her. She simply chose self-destruction rather than stay what she was. The explosion came afterward: energy released from a corpse with nothing left to hold it together.

  Kaboom.

  I’D ALREADY SEEN THAT BLAST IN MY HALLUCINATION

  That gave me a split-second advantage. I still didn’t have Spark-o-Vision, but I could see that the explosion had knocked Aria and the bogeyman into a heap, just as in my dream. As fast as I could think, I transmitted, «Aria! Get the bogeyman outside. Now!»

  In the dream, Aria had rescued Ninety-Nine and let the bogeyman blow himself to pieces. This time, she scooped up the bogeyman in her arms and shot through the hole in the side of the building, flying at the speed of sound.

  Even at Mach 1, she couldn’t fly far. The Bride’s explosion had sent the bogeyman into that fatal light-dark strobing. Aria only had a moment to whip him away from the building, then get herself clear.

  She disappeared out of the hole in the wall. I stayed where I was and listened. The lumber around me creaked and cracked and groaned as the building teetered back and forth.

  Outside I heard a distant explosion. The end of the bogeyman. I could have used my comm ring to ask if Aria was all right, but I was afraid I might get no answer.

  THE RIFT GAVE A DRUMBEAT THUD

  It had already broken through the floor that separated the upper and lower levels. I couldn’t see how much farther it reached, but unless someone stopped it, the top of the rift would soon spike through the building’s roof.

  That would be bad, maybe total-collapse bad. The rift puncturing the roof might be the straw that broke the Market’s back.

  Luckily, I knew how to close rifts: Power down the rift projector. I jumped into the air and flapped toward Popigai’s “replicator.”

  NOW THAT I LOOKED AT THE MACHINE, I COULD SEE SIMILARITIES TO THE ONE IN POPIGAI’S LAB

  Both were the same size and shape. But there were two major differences:

  I couldn’t see a plug on the Market machine. Damn. It must have had a built-in battery or some other power supply.

  Also, the machine in the lab had had a glassy exterior so I could see the weird components inside. The one in the market was encased in steel, hiding the Mad Genius guts.

  The opaque case might also be hiding booby traps. Considering the state of the building, I didn’t want to set off yet another explosion (or a pandemic, black hole, or any of the other things Aria had worried about). On the other hand, if I let the rift grow, it would bring down the building anyway.

  No choice: I had to get into the machine and shut off its power. That meant dealing with any traps it might contain. Unfortunately, disarming traps wasn’t my thing, especially when my perception consisted of two myopic eyes.

  Just cope, I told myself. Ninety-Nine might be our Olympic-level bomb disarmer, but I was the one who could get into small places.

  The glamorous life of a hero: If entering Darkling orifices wasn’t bad enough, now I was going to climb inside a bomb.

  I ALMOST HEADED STRAIGHT INTO THE REPLICATOR

  Then I pictured myself the size of a gnat, ripping out electrical wires. Instant bug zapper! Zircon-hard skin would do zilch against electricity. The current would pass right through me, fry my tissues, and stop my heart.

  I couldn’t do this job with bare hands. My gloves wouldn’t help at all—at this size, they were so thin, they provided zero insulation. I needed a tool.

  Or maybe three tools. Yeah.

  I flew back to that stall with the three magic daggers. Gold, silver, and bronze were all excellent conductors, so the blades wouldn’t save me from getting jolted. The hilts, however, were bone. I had no idea how well normal bone conducted electricity, but these bones were imbued with magic.

  Magic doesn’t play well with electricity. The two aren’t completely incompatible—plenty of Darkling wizards have developed lightning-bolt spells. But electrical conduction is a Science thing, locked into the framework of physics. Magic hates cooperating with the physics worldview; that’s fraternizing with the enemy. If there’s an escape clause, magic takes it.

  Mark it down as another chance for plausible deniability. Everyone knows that metal conducts electricity. The magical metal blades had no choice but to follow the rules. Bone, however …

  I grew to Max Zirc size and said in a loud, clear voice, “I happen to know that magic-enhanced bones are perfect insulators.”

  Then I picked up all three knives in a single sweep.

  DAKINI HAD WARNED US AGAINST TOUCHING THE DAGGERS

  Why did I blithely ignore her?

  Because the Zircon part of me said, “I’m a Spark, and I can handle whatever happens.”

  Because the part of me left over from Kimmi was obsessed with magic and the Dark.

  Because the part that was Kim said, “You nee
d this. If you don’t have good offensive weapons, you can’t operate on your own.”

  Or maybe the knives just called to me, and without my teammates, I didn’t have the self-control to resist.

  Whatever the reason, I scooped up the knives as casually as cleaning up after dinner. Whereupon Nicholas appeared out of nowhere and said, “Are you insane?”

  HE WRENCHED THE DAGGERS FROM MY GRIP

  I didn’t feel him touch me at all. His hands passed through mine, as if I were the ghost, but his grip on the knives was solid. He seized them from me, gold, silver, and bronze, and I couldn’t hold on. My fingers refused to tighten. The daggers’ sheaths rose up from the table and hovered in midair without support. One by one, Nicholas released the knives and they slithered into their sheaths like trained snakes. They continued to levitate in front of us both as Nicholas said, “What were you thinking?”

  “I need them,” I said. “To destroy the machine that’s projecting the rift.”

  “Hard to do that when you’re dead,” Nicholas growled. “The Goblin puts antitheft spells on all his stuff. You’re allowed half a minute to pick them up and examine them. After that…” He narrowed his eyes and stared closely at the knives’ hilts. “I can only read the first few curses, but the knives start with stabbing you in the eyeballs. Then they get creative. I don’t know what powers you have, Zircon, but you’d need a lot to survive.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, then thanks, uhh, Wraith.”

  I couldn’t meet his gaze, but I felt him glaring. The force of his Shadow pummeled me; I could resist it, but if I’d been human I might have fainted. Mortals don’t do well in confrontations with angry ghosts. After a moment, I said, “Can you please stop that? You’ll turn my hair white.”

  He gave a snort of a laugh. The pressure from his Shadow eased. “Do you really need the daggers?” he asked.

  “Maybe.” I gestured toward the replicator. “It’s a Mad Genius machine, and it’s feeding the rift. I need to shut it down, and Cape Tech tends to be vulnerable to magic.”

  The rift chose that moment for another drumbeat thud. The hole heaved wider and taller. The roof shrieked with the sound of wood rupturing.