All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault

by James Alan Gardner

  Nicholas said, “Fuck!” and threw up his hands, as if he were catching something heavy coming down on his head. The daggers that had been floating between us fell with a clatter. “Fuck,” he said again. “I can’t hold this weight for long.”

  “You can hold up the roof?” I said in surprise.

  He gave a strained smile. “I’m a ghost; I have a knack with wooden buildings. I can seep straight into the woodgrain and make it do tricks. Faces looming out of the wall, that sort of crap. But I can also strengthen the rafters. A bit. For maybe a minute.”

  The muscles in his arms bulged as if he were actually holding up a load. He’d always had great upper-body strength from using the chair. But he was sinking under the burden. His vaporous body now ended at the level of his navel rather than his hips, and his head was well below mine.

  “Anytime you want to do something,” Nicholas said, grunting under the weight, “please go right ahead.” He nodded toward the daggers. “They should be safe now.”

  “You dispelled the curses?”

  “Ripped them to shit.” Another strained smile. “Ghosts are good with curses—putting them on, taking them off. Of course, those are still magic weapons. They’ll try to corrupt you, blah blah blah. But probably not in the next minute. Which is how long you’ve got before my arms give out.”

  I snatched up the daggers, tucked their sheaths into my belt, and shrank.

  OMNIMORPHISM FTW: THE DAGGERS SHRANK WHEN I DID

  Getting inside the replicator was no problem. Cape Tech can thumb its nose at mundane physics, but it still needs to keep up appearances. Specifically, the replicator needed ventilation slits to dissipate waste heat. Otherwise, the machine wouldn’t be Science-y enough. So I went in through a vent, at which point I realized the first glitch in my plans.

  The interior was dark, and my Spark-o-Vision was still off-line. All I could sense in the blackness was the machine’s incessant hum. The hum shook the floor under my feet so strongly, it threw me off like a bucking bronco and I ended up floating in the air. I needed light before I drifted into something high-voltage.

  A solution occurred to me. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo’s sword glowed in the dark.

  I drew one of the daggers (I couldn’t tell which) and held it in front of me like He-Man yelling, “By the power of Grayskull!” Instead, I yelled, “Light!”

  The continuing blackness mocked me.

  I said, “Really? Really?” But I knew what the damned dagger wanted: the standard price for the Dark to acknowledge you. Sighing, I took off one of my nice white gloves. I touched my finger against the knife point and pushed.

  My skin was solid rock, but apparently I could turn that off if I really wanted. A patch of my stone turned to flesh, and the dagger tip went in. I pictured my blood squirting onto the blade.

  Let there be light.

  THE LIGHT WAS TINTED BRONZE; THAT TOLD ME WHICH BLADE I’D DRAWN

  The first things I saw were my finger and the knife. My finger oozed blood, but the blade was clean and dry, as if it had swallowed the blood with thirsty glee. If anything, the dagger seemed shinier than before.

  “Excellent,” I said. “I see no way that this can end badly.” Luckily, I couldn’t hear my voice, so I couldn’t hear it waver.

  HOLDING THE KNIFE ALOFT LIKE A TORCH, I EXAMINED THE REPLICATOR’S GUTS

  Under the dagger’s bronze light, my surroundings looked like a sepia photograph: out of focus, thanks to my 20/60 eyes. But I could see well enough to recognize components similar to the ones I’d seen in Popigai’s lab. The wired-up lemon … the brain in a jar … the ray gun being fired by a robot hand.

  Good. These were things I could slice and dice with my trusty daggers. Especially the brain.

  Mind you, the jar holding the brain looked impenetrable. At my size, the glass was thicker than I was tall. Breaching it would be like cracking the wall of an air-raid bunker.

  But you can’t have a brain in a jar without feeding it blood, and I had already established what blood was good for.

  Since I needed the bronze dagger’s light, I swapped that knife to my left hand and pulled out the next one in my belt: the silver. It leapt out of its sheath and into my hand, as if it knew it was next. I lifted it and showed it the jar.

  “You want that?” I asked with the sort of fake enthusiasm you use when you play fetch with a dog. “Yummy yummy blood! Do you see?”

  The dagger quivered.

  I touched the knife tip to the glass and said, “Go get it! Get the blood!”

  I let go of the hilt. The knife fell. It lay on the floor and continued to quiver, as if writhing with desire but still on its leash.

  I rolled my eyes. “Who makes up these rules?” Sighing, I retrieved the knife and squeezed my already pricked finger to get a new drop of blood. When it touched the silver blade, I swear I could hear a slurp.

  “Now are you ready?” I asked. The dagger wiggled in my hand as if wagging its tail. I pressed the blade’s tip against the jar and aimed it at the brain inside. I said, “Sic,” and pushed harder.

  The dagger burrowed into the glass like a piranha into a heifer. Its passage left a knife-sized tunnel. Molten glass dripped from the tunnel mouth but quickly solidified, like transparent candle wax.

  Within a heartbeat, the knife had dug through the glass and into the blood. I had trouble following it after that—the knife swam and feasted, repeatedly whisking out of sight inside the scarlet murk, then reappearing as a silver flash far from where it had been. Each time the knife vanished, the brain shook from an unseen impact. Soon, chunks of detached cortex floated in the fluid like bits of cauliflower in tomato soup.

  I really hoped the brain wasn’t still conscious. I imagined what was left of a living person losing fragments of IQ and memory as pieces got hacked away.

  But if the brain was still capable of thought, it would surely thank me for ending its awful existence.

  ANOTHER DRUMBEAT THUD SOUNDED OUTSIDE THE MACHINE

  Was the rift shrinking or growing? I wanted to go out and see, but I was on the clock. Nicholas would soon run out of strength.

  The replicator still seemed to be running. The robot hand was still pulling the ray gun’s trigger, and the gun was firing with the same frequency as when I’d first seen it. Perhaps the brain in the jar had been a computer used only in setup, deciding when to activate the rift projection mechanism. Now that the process had started, destroying the brain didn’t halt the machine.

  So, the ray gun. Shutting it down had to be good, right? But the gun obviously ran off a powerful energy source, and damaging that source might loose a storm of who-knows-what. It was safer to stop the hand that pulled the trigger. Doing that wasn’t risk-free, but it seemed the lesser of two evils.

  THE HAND WAS ENORMOUS

  I was a millimeter tall. A normal hand is, what, ten centimeters across? So the hand was a hundred times my height. Attacking it would be like taking on a fifty-story building, and all I had was daggers.

  If I’d still had Spark-o-Vision, I could have searched for weaknesses. Maybe laser-sighting would have homed in on a size-appropriate target. But all I had were my normal eyes and the light of the bronze dagger.

  Hmm. I thrust the dagger forward. “Show me where to stab.”

  Brown light shot from the dagger’s tip. The beam burned with the brightness of molten copper, focusing on the center of the robot hand’s wrist—exactly where you’d cut to commit suicide.

  Oh good, not creepy at all.

  I DREW THE FINAL DAGGER: THE GOLD ONE

  By the time-honored rules of fairy tales, the golden knife had to be the most badass. I wondered what it had been built to do. Maybe like me and my teammates, the weapon wasn’t yet locked into a specific power set: It was ready to be what I wished for, provided I danced to the right tune.

  I knew how the dance started. I grimaced and squeezed more blood from my punctured finger. Before I could dab the drop on the golden blade, the dagger m
oved of its own accord. It lifted its tip and plunged into one of my other fingers. Apparently, a knife made of gold was too posh to drink from another knife’s wound. The blade embedded itself in my flesh and sucked like a hungry piglet feeding from its mother for the first time.

  It hurt more than it should have. I had a stomach-churning flashback to Kimmi in Elaine’s study, and I yanked the knife out with all my strength.

  Blood erupted from the wound. In my head, I heard the dagger snicker.

  “Oh, nice,” I told the weapon. “Stop being a dick and get to work.”

  I TOOK TO THE AIR, FLYING TOWARD THE POINT ON THE ROBOT HAND LIT BY THE BRONZE KNIFE’S BEAM

  I wish I could have taken a selfie because it was definitely a look: me holding my cape spread wide, with the bronze knife in my left hand and the gold one in my right. Blood streamed from my fingers as I flapped, spattering red on my white costume. Weird shadows fluttered around me as the bronze knife moved, giving me the start of a headache. When I reached the robot wrist, I glared at its polished metal surface then rammed the golden dagger into my own reflection.

  The hand clenched in agony—a spasm that jerked it free from the gun and closed its fingers into a fist. It squeezed tight, then tighter. A real hand would have gone white-knuckled. Then the fist simply fell apart. The rivets, screws, and solder that held the hand together collapsed from sheer exhaustion.

  Wires and circuits and ball joints sloughed off limply. They dropped to the bottom of the replicator’s box like my hair when I ran electric clippers over my scalp.

  Quietly, I withdrew the golden knife and slid it back into its sheath. It adjusted its hang slightly, making itself more comfortable against my hip—like a snake settling into a new home.

  THE REPLICATOR STOPPED HUMMING

  I could literally feel the silence. The air around me stopped vibrating, and I was becalmed enough to drift downward, like silt in a lake that only settles to the bottom when the wave action stops. Mission accomplished, I guess. I began flying for the exit.

  I couldn’t see outside the machine, but I could tell when Nicholas’s strength gave out: I could hear the squall of nails ripping out of wood. I waited for timbers to crash, pulping everything under their weight.

  But nothing happened. Either the roof was still managing to hold or someone else had taken on the burden.

  Dakini might have held the roof up with telekinesis. Darklings might have stepped in too: either ones with powers like Nicholas’s, or wizards who could cast appropriate spells. But I had no way to tell, and nothing to do except keep flying.

  As I did, something warm and wet brushed my cheek like a dog’s tongue. I flinched and shrank a hundred times smaller, but it made no difference—I could feel the slobbery thing slither down the front of my shirt. I looked and saw the silver dagger sliding into its sheath on my belt. The knife was covered with blood and whatever fluids might be excreted by a brain in a jar. It left a gory trail down my shirtfront.

  “Awesome,” I muttered, and kept flapping.

  I EXITED THROUGH A VENT HOLE

  Outside, no sign of Nicholas. When you’re a ghost, I guess you like vanishing. At least the rift was shrinking. Its top edge had sunken below the ground floor’s ceiling; its bottom had risen out of the hole it had dug in the floorboards. The rift hung in midair, no longer threatening to pop the building at its seams. Stinking vapor continued to dribble out of the opening, but it seemed half-hearted.

  So, ten points to Gryffindor (i.e., me) and only one pressing issue left: What would happen when the rift shut completely? A final explosion, as in the lab? If so, it would bring down the building, and I had no idea how to prevent it.

  «Dakini,» I transmitted. «Are you available?»

  «I’m helping evacuate,» she answered. «But if there’s something more urgent … »

  «We need to get Popigai’s replicator outside. It might be programmed to explode when the rift closes. Popigai probably likes to cover his tracks.»

  «I’ll come immediately,» she said.

  «Aria,» I transmitted, «Dakini is going to move the replicator, and when she does, she may set off booby traps. Can you surround the machine with a force field? Just till we get it outside.»

  A pause. Then, «I’ll do my best.»

  Aria didn’t sound good. The last time I’d seen her, she was flying out of the building with the bogeyman. I wondered how close she’d been when he exploded. She would have had her force field up, but she sounded injured. Concussion? Internal bleeding? It scared me to hear her so haggard. Miranda had always struck me as an unstoppable force of nature, and surely Aria was more so.

  Moments later, Aria appeared in the hole through which she’d left the building. She wasn’t flying; she was barely walking. She clutched the edge of the hole to prevent herself from falling.

  Her golden dress was tattered and burnt. I couldn’t tell where the charred shreds ended and the body underneath began, because Aria’s flesh had been blackened too. She clung to the broken boards and did nothing but pant.

  Dakini didn’t look much better as she floated down the stairs. She hadn’t been torched like Aria; she’d been slashed by something with claws. Four long parallel gashes cut the side of her costume. Some were-beast must have gone crazy and taken it out on her. Dakini’s skin was too dark to show blood at this distance, but any attack that hacked up her clothes must have gouged her too. She still had the energy to fly, sprawled on a platform of violet energy like a flying carpet. But her platform just limped along, barely clearing the ground.

  I felt guilty asking my teammates to exert themselves more. Compared to them, what injuries did I have? Two pricked fingers. Boo-hoo. How could I ask them to exhaust themselves further when I wasn’t even breathing hard?

  But neither Dakini nor Aria would thank me for calling them off. They both had mountains of pride that wouldn’t let them quit. They likely wouldn’t back off now, even if I asked.

  And the replicator might explode. So I said nothing.

  ARIA SANG A LOW NOTE

  Not loud, but like one of those give-you-shivers songs that start off softly, then build. (“My Body is a Cage.” “I Dreamed a Dream.”) The note expanded gently as it moved until, by the time it reached the replicator, it was big enough to wrap the whole machine in a golden blanket.

  Gold. I could see Aria’s power. Did that mean my Spark-o-Vision was returning? Yes. A ghost of it overlaid my mere eyes, faint but growing.

  Dakini let her flying carpet dissipate, probably to conserve her strength. She sat down on the stairs like a kid on the front stoop. Violet light misted out of her forehead, as thin as fog on a morning river. It crossed the Market and slid under the replicator. Dakini grunted as she raised the machine just far enough off the floor to let it move. Carefully, ponderously, the cloudy forklift carried the replicator toward the hole in the wall.

  Aria’s voice sounded through the Market: “Ahhh.” And in that golden light, Spark-o-Vision replaced eyesight and I could fully see again.

  I saw the rift closing slowly like bacon shriveling in a pan. I saw Darklings from the upper floor standing on the stairs just above Dakini. They watched the replicator being borne away, and although they didn’t know what it was, they realized it had to be dangerous. Tension—like watching someone in a lab coat gingerly carrying a test tube toward a disposal unit. Several people also watched from the ground floor: people who’d been far enough away from the explosions, or hardy enough to endure the blasts. Ninety-Nine was there, with a were-hyena draped around her shoulders. She and the others watched the machine’s progress, like a crowd mutely lining the street for a funeral procession. The only sound was Aria’s low note holding her force field in place.

  The rift closed. The replicator flared, a nova inside the force field. But like a nova in the vacuum of space, it was completely silent.

  It wouldn’t be silent for long. Novas are like lightning: Their light travels faster than their thunder, but eventually the shock
wave arrives. Aria’s “Ahhh” became a growl, a rasp fighting the inferno in its grip. Aria’s lips drew back in a rictus, and Dakini wore almost the same expression. She was trying to drive the machine faster, to get it outside before Aria ran out of breath.

  The machine neared the hole where Aria stood, holding onto the broken boards. Aria’s eyes had squeezed shut with effort; she likely didn’t know how close the machine was to her. If her strength gave out, not only would the explosion rip down the building, she’d be at ground zero.

  Ninety-Nine said, «Come on, Aria, don’t be a wuss.» She let the hyena slide off her shoulders and sprinted across the room. «Don’t freak,» she told Aria, «I’ve got you.» As the replicator edged outside, a fireball trapped in a song, Ninety-Nine wrapped her arms around Aria to keep her from falling. «Hang on, you big doof, just a few seconds more.»

  Ninety-Nine moved Aria inside the building and around the corner of the wall. She put her own body between Aria and the machine.

  At the very last instant, a sheet of gray energy spread across the hole, and the entire outer wall of the building. A Wraithly barrier, as tenuous as smoke. When Aria finally passed out and her note fell silent, the explosion broke free from its pent-up violence and shredded the ghostly barrier into a million wisps.

  But it was enough. The Market stayed standing.

  MY TEAMMATES, NOT SO MUCH

  Aria was unconscious. Dakini slumped back against the stairs, too exhausted to move. Ninety-Nine lay sprawled across Aria’s body; she’d taken a portion of the blast, despite Nicholas’s last-ditch shield. The back of Ninety-Nine’s jersey was burning. The satin 99 had shriveled to ash, baring raw red skin beneath.

  She regenerates, I told myself as I flew across the room. I didn’t know what I intended to do; maybe just stand guard until Ninety-Nine healed and Aria woke up. But as I landed beside them and grew to Max Zirc size, my perception jerked out of my control.

  It felt the same as when my viewpoint did that camera-shot tracking to the Widow’s car. Spark-o-Vision wanted to show me something. It zoomed out the hole in the wall and into the sky.