The Brilliant Dark

by S. M. Beiko

  * * *

  The problem with any bit of tech that is worn to augment reality is that anyone can augment it. So reality itself is easily manipulated. Saskia knew that better than anyone, code or not.

  She’d spent foundational weeks, probably more like months, sculpting and designing and building the enormous image of Deon now burned into the retinas of the fleeing guards. Her research had been thorough. She’d interviewed a lot of older Foxes who had been more than happy to describe the god their Family had taught them to revere. An enormous warrior woman, with a head — or a helm, some people said — of a fox, with a mantle of white flames on her wide shoulders, nine tails, like the Japanese myth, wagging behind her, arms and legs braced in the leathery hide of primordial beasts she’d slaughtered with her blade of flickering purple garnet.

  A world like this could still use a few heroes. And Saskia was more than happy to provide one.

  The second problem with tech wired into an optic nerve is that seeing was believing. Whatever the poor viewer was seeing, their brain registered it as real. Corporeal. So if that manufactured semi-hologram took a swipe at you, your eyes told your brain which told your body that you were, in pointed terms, screwed.

  These were problems Saskia had planned for. But she had her own crosses to bear. To get the best range, she had to move in order to make her digital Deon maquette move. She picked up an errant bit of fence from what was probably Ella’s first foray into criminal terrorism, and that bit of fence became Deon’s garnet blade. Many of the Task Guard weren’t sticking around long enough to figure out they were being bested by a ghost in their well-oiled machine.

  It was anarchy, to say the least. And those without the faux–Spirit Eye tech could only catch the fleeing guards’ hysteria. She hoped Ella had dropped the stupid risk-taking bravado and seen this turn for what it was — a way out. Saskia lifted her visor, and her enormous, flickering mirage of Deon stood over her body like a skin, waiting for her next physical command. There was a flare of fire somewhere near the huge stone steps of the legislature, and in that flash Saskia swore she saw a girl, grinning, as she ushered two others past the still-dead fence and into the safety of the dark.

  Saskia laughed out loud, pumped her tense fist. She imagined that her VR Deon cracked its wide fox jaws in an unsettling smirk of its own.

  Then her chest tightened, because in that same dark she’d just thought safe, something else climbed out into the gloaming and was staring right at Saskia.

  She stopped breathing. No. Not now. Not again.

  There was a second of pregnant silence, then a bang like a thunderclap in her skull, and the lights and the sirens were back on, the doors of the Old Leg bursting open before her, with the Task Guard in their cruel grey service-issue uniforms pouring out.

  “No,” she hissed. She slammed the visor down, ripped the tablet from her pants as she backed up towards the busted fence she’d just so brazenly come through, certain and unafraid. But when she whirled, she was knocked over by the butt of something made of steel, and the tablet and the visor went flying. They didn’t matter now. Both were dead. Her head rang with pain, and she tried to get up, to run like Barton had taught her, but her hands were being pinned behind her, a zip tie tightening as a knee pressed her into the cold pavement.

  She didn’t close her eyes, though, still staring at the place where Ella had gotten away. Where the Moth Queen stood, as she had moments ago, clear as the illusion of Deon Saskia had conjured. She knew this was no illusion. Death’s many eyes were full of their terrible knowing. Her enormous wings gaped wide, her many needle fingers folded, patient.

  “Follow the moth,” the great old Mother Death whispered. “The choice must be yours.”

  The words cut the last shrinking bit of fight out of her. As Saskia was hauled to her feet like a quivering fawn in a sprung snare, and she was taken up the steps and inside, all that was left behind were a few brown moths, fluttering around the floodlights of the city’s Denizen prison.

  Primer

  From the manifesto of Chancellor Lochlan Grant, formerly of the White Militia, now chancellor of the independent U.N.-overseen Elemental Task Guard:

  Their book of faith was printed on scrap paper, trash, using old binding methods. Methods that couldn’t be tracked, everything done and copied by hand. Sometimes the paper was handmade, the covers stitched to the block. Handwritten, like it was just another one of their rituals, another way of staying separate from us.

  So much has changed in the intervening seven years, and the removal of the last copy of this book from the streets has me thinking of the propaganda of wars gone by. Wars to come. Strange to think that all it took was for these enemies to throw another moon into the sky and reveal that yes — magic is real. If you want to call it that. A genetic anomaly, more like. People casting out evil frequencies.

  But magic is here. It’s always been here. Hidden from us. Denied us. That book, that primer, it mocked us, those of us who were born normal, but what they call “mundane.” The book is gone now, but its memory endures.

  The books littered the streets in the beginning, though you won’t find them now, except in our military archives. Know thine enemy. Back then, when the dark moon showed up, you could find the books, sometimes mere zines, washing up in gutters, on people’s doorsteps, thrust into mailboxes. Yes, we exist, they tried to say with these gestures. We mean you no harm. Read our parables, our myths and legends. Know that they are real. Understand that they are true. The world may be coming down on top of us because of them — but we mean you no harm.

  A book has never been a more dangerous weapon.

  We all found ourselves living inside a strange fable, even as we tried to resume our normal lives. Where were you when the world cracked open? Was anyone close to you found out to be one of those hex-slinging psychopaths? Didn’t your uncle get turned into a nightmare tree? So I guess the world is tired of humans, eh, if these god-things have anything to say about it?

  It’s an international crisis. But the sun keeps rising and we have to keep going. Schools closed for a while. Some people didn’t leave their houses. If you found out your neighbour could drown your family or scorch them to dust or obliterate everything you owned in a hurricane — it’s not even a question of what would you do. It’s what did you do? There was a lot of violence and chaos that came out of it, despite how these Ancient-followers tried to reassure us they meant us no harm. They hide behind friendly animal faces. And we all watched them, I’m sure — the U.N. trials were televised as the leaders of this cult came forward of their own free wills. Pious martyrs, hands held open. Their demonstrations of power were proved legitimate. We were living in Fantasyland, population seven billion. They mean us no harm.

  They call themselves Denizens. I will continue to call them monsters until we can truly say we’ve achieved peace. They are, at their hearts, extremists. Conjuring arcane powers that shouldn’t have been only theirs to command. Powers tracing back to gods. Real ones. And further back to one godhead: Ancient. The name is burned behind my eyes. It should be in yours, too. I’ve asked myself every day — why is such a force, with such power, sleeping as this all happens to the world it apparently “made”? Where is their god now? Then I look up at that dark moon above and wonder, Is it coming for us after all?

  You don’t remotely want to entertain these questions sometimes, I know. Because a part of you always believed that the world wasn’t as pedestrian as we imagined. Now you hear about these grand battles and a secret war and you think, There’s no place for me in this magical world. I’m only human. Mundane.

  We look to the sky every day, though, and no matter how closely the story touched us, we’re all part of it now.

  The Denizen extremists called it “The Darkling Moon.” They were all about using figures of speech that evoked their mythological brainwashing. As if it would make the reality a bit easier to choke down. It isn�
��t really a moon, anyway, not by science’s estimation. It has no mass; it doesn’t affect tides. It’s just a shadow hanging above the world, one we can all see, no matter the time of day. It doesn’t abide physics or reason. We didn’t deem it a threat, just a smudge. The real threat was walking among us. Had been for longer than anyone cared to find out.

  But the book tried to prove otherwise.

  It was destroyed. And that defense was a reactionary one, for all of you who think us the extremists. The Task Guard is a force guided, in principle, by the nations of the world. A conflict beyond any of us had hurt defenseless people. You can’t blame anyone for the reaction that made the Task Guard a means of survival, of inevitability. We’ve all seen the groves of the twisted dead. Monsters creep around in broad daylight. Tar sands and reserves of precious industrial resources and whole economies have been ransacked and collapsed because of this Ancient, because of its people. This is our new reality. We didn’t shape it, they did.

  Their book outlines the basics of this parallel world. They try to paint themselves as our allies. Forget that now. It has and always will be us against them. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been in the dark all this time, would we? Nor would we be in this new dark now.

  When I first saw the book it was early days, when the curtain had just been lifted, back in 2013. Denizens were trying to regroup, trying to pull themselves together to win sympathy from the rest of us sorry sods. We mean you no harm.

  But we all have to look at that savage smudge in the sky. That’s the evidence of harm yet to come.

  The book outlines the basics. There are five arcane powers:

  Fire. Water. Wind. Earth. Spirit.

  Each of these powers is governed by a god — a First Matriarch. That’s your next problem: a religion steered by women. Each of these matriarchs has an animal totem: fox for fire, seal for water, owl for wind, rabbit for earth, deer for spirit. There’s more. It goes on and on. Stones. Prophecies. Darkness. Good and evil. And death. Always death.

  All you need to know is that it’s dangerous. I’ve seen these people in action when they’re desperate. No better than the witches of a bygone era, trying to control us. Maybe they have always been controlling us. After all, those Owls, the ones who have cooperated with us since Dark Day — when that moon showed up and started driving everyone to lunacy — they were the ones keeping all this hidden. They were the old authority. Mind control. What else could they control?

  But no longer. This is the new age. The new authority. The world has seen its share of growing pains already. I’ll be the first to admit that. But you have to make the tough calls for the greater good. In order for certain ways of life to survive. For the right way. The Mundane way.

  The Denizen way was not meant to survive. They had to come to an end eventually. I am hoping that, together, we can take them into that good night, and we can all be back on an even playing field. We have yet to open the right door and see them out of it.

  Magic — it’s something that needs to stay where it was born. In a book. In the dark. Out of our hands.

  And out of theirs.

  Task Guard Teeth

  The aide found him at the window, staring down into the square below the building’s Tyndall stone steps. Where it all had unfolded, hours ago, where patrol had since been doubled, where clean-up was ongoing. Where the evidence of the attack had been cleared, but the memory of the threat lingered over heavily edited broadcasts. The Owl Unit had been dispatched to do the dirty work on most of that. They have their uses, the chancellor had said.

  Mi-ja had knocked demurely on his office door, but the chancellor hadn’t answered right away. Now she knew why.

  “Sir?”

  He was so still that, for a moment, he didn’t look real, mannequin-rigid on the other side of his desk, staring out the window, a book in his hand. The cover was hunter green, a colour that made Mi-ja think of home, which made her think of her mother, a Rabbit in disguise from even her own daughter, and the day she was dragged away by the Task Guard. Her mother’s betrayal had shattered everything she’d held dear about who she was, about what her family was. It had been the reason Mi-ja joined up in the first place: Denizens in secret could only cause harm. She wouldn’t see that happen to anyone else, and so, like many others, she’d joined the Task Guard as soon as it formed, to do her part.

  But she knew the book. It was the chancellor’s account of the Restoration Project. Part of the Task Guard training syllabus, the book contained tales of the front line when the moon appeared, when the global threat of Denizens hit them all over the head. Mi-ja had found the book slightly manic, and so had few expectations for its author, a man she had only just met after being assigned to him on this diplomatic mission.

  Mania didn’t quite cover it.

  The chancellor still hadn’t turned, and the rise of his starched back was so minute she couldn’t tell if he was breathing or not.

  “Clever, wasn’t it?”

  His remark cut the silence suddenly, and, hating herself for it, Mi-ja faltered. She wasn’t one to be flustered, not with her training. Not with her loyalties already tested.

  “Sir, I don’t —”

  “The trick,” he replied, and she heard the frown in his sharp words before he finally turned, and she saw the proof of it.

  Mi-ja loosened her clenched jaw. “Sir. The hacker has been detained in the isolation block. Her file and detailed background check have been processed. We have not yet contacted her guardian, as per your request, though the time frame for questioning a minor without guardian contact is narrowing.”

  No response but a slow exhalation. He turned away again, and she could see his face in profile; his eyes were dark, dark as the city skyline beyond the caustic floodlights of the Task Guard compound.

  “A Denizen?”

  Mi-ja shook her head, though he didn’t look over to see the gesture. “No, sir. A Mundane. Cohabitates with Denizens and has quite a history with them.” Out from under her arm she pulled the thin screen she’d carried in with her, the one with the prisoner’s information. She should have read the file with her usual detachment, but she couldn’t help feel a pang of pity for the girl. “The insurgents —”

  “Got away. Of course they did. That was the point of the ruse.”

  The chancellor finally gave up the window and turned. Mi-ja had only seen him at a distance when he’d arrived earlier that morning from Ottawa, and seeing him close up now she was shocked by his youth, knowing the things he’d done, the things he’d said, and his deeply rooted beliefs that had basically formed the core of the Elemental Task Guard in the first place.

  “It won’t be the last attack, for well and certain. If they’re Cluster-initiated, or independent rebels, it smacks of knowing how close we are. I’d get used to it, if I were you.”

  Mi-ja narrowed her eyes, found it odd that he sounded so flippant about the Fox terrorists who had just blasted through their security gate.

  “The hacker, though,” he went on, now standing in front of her, expectant, his neat desk between them. He put the book in a drawer at his hand, locked it. “A girl, you said?”

  She did not like the dangerous spike of light in his eyes, but she met them all the same and nodded. “First-time offender, lives in the neighbourhood —”

  He made a noise of impatience, signalling she hand over her screen to him. Like beckoning a terrier. Too many in her unit and in this facility were falling over themselves for this man. She’d forgotten to be unsettled and swung to annoyance.

  But he was her superior. With a plastic smile, she passed him the device, which he snatched and dove into, flicking his fingers across the screen, his glare flying as he absorbed the file.

  “First time,” the chancellor scoffed. It wasn’t a question. “An incredible feat of digital terrorism on a military organization for a first-timer. And she’s how old?”
>
  He was already turning away from her again, so Mi-ja wasn’t even sure the question was directed at her. “Sixteen,” she said.

  Pity for the girl welled up again. Maybe it was because the girl was alone, or because Mi-ja had seen how terrified she was when the cell door had slammed shut. She hadn’t even whimpered, but Mi-ja had seen the girl’s eyes.

  So she couldn’t help but blurt, “Surely she was just protecting her friends. And since she wasn’t the one directly responsible for the damage, or capable of it —”

  The chancellor swung around the desk and to her side like a man who had learned to be fast as a means to strike first. Mi-ja took a step backward but met that unforgiving glare, this man whose “study” of Denizens and their lore had been a keystone of Restoration, and for ETG trainees. Especially those in Winnipeg, which was deemed ground zero to a lot of what had shaped the new world.

  “Do you know why I’m here?” He searched her uniform for rank. “Lieutenant?”

  Oh, she knew. But she’d said too much already, so she only replied, “The Zabor Incident.”

  His shined shoes audibly creaked as he leaned back, his smile cutting lines in his too-young-for-what-he’d-done face. “This city,” he started, canting his head back towards the window, and the pockmarked urbania beyond. “It’s nowhere. Winnipeg has never been on the global radar. But we should have been looking closer. That was our first lesson. Because this is where it all started. Where it all keeps starting.” The smile splintered into a sneer. “A teen hacker, a Mundane, one of us, no less, went to such lengths to protect her Denizen friends? Loyalty is no longer innocuous, Lieutenant. Nothing is a coincidence. So don’t get precious with me, especially now. Especially today.”

  He lifted the screen as if it were a menu, a list of information to be digested into ammunition. The image of the girl flickered on the LED, and Mi-ja felt her stomach tighten. As terrified as the girl had been during processing, she was about to be at Chancellor Grant’s mercy. And Mi-ja didn’t imagine such a thing existed.