by Jenn Stark
I could also attempt Mongolian, but at the moment, I couldn’t conjure up a single word. Maybe I needed to hear the language first?
Giving the warrior another big smile, I tried again. “You, ah, speak Mongolian?”
The man disappeared back into the house, leaving me on the doorstep. I’d begun despairing of my future as a replacement-windows salesperson, when I heard a series of locks alternately clicking and sighing open, and then the unmistakable sound of a chain being released. A second later, the Mongolian opened the door wide, then gestured me forward, all without saying a word.
I stepped inside the shockingly cool ranch home as he shut the door behind me. I wasn’t sure how long Simon had owned the place, but it was clear the previous resident had been female, older, and particularly fond of crochet. From the hallway alone, I could look in and see two additional guards sitting at the kitchen table, both of them with large shawls of fuzzy blue and yellow yarn thrown over their shoulders.
I couldn’t say I blamed them. Now that I was getting used to the change in temperature, I could tell that it was a good ten or fifteen degrees lower than it really should be inside a home that didn’t cater to penguins.
There was a commotion in the back of the house, and a second later, Simon came hurtling into the living room—legitimately hurtling, as he was wearing sweatpants, a T-shirt, a hoodie, and fuzzy socks, and his forward momentum sent him rocketing across the laminate floor. Arms windmilling, he shot right past the doorway where I was standing and into the far wall, bouncing off it and spinning around.
“Sara! You came. I’m glad. I didn’t know if I’d be able to see you before everything happened, and I wanted to give you what I could. Sort of like a Christmas present with an Easter egg inside.” He grinned, and I smiled back encouragingly, pretending that I got the joke. With Simon, that happened a lot more than I was comfortable with. The guy had been walking this earth since the eighties, but he always made me feel like a little old lady learning the internet for the first time.
“You want to say that again in English?” I asked, working his words around in my head. “A present for who? What kind of Easter egg?”
“Come on! It’ll be easier to explain if you see it. And plus, you can help me too. Help everyone. So much help all around.”
Simon led me deep into the house, which was bigger than I’d expected. The hallway terminated in a little cul-de-sac of three bedrooms and a bathroom, and it was at the second of the bedrooms that Simon turned, placing his hand on the closed door. “It’s a little chilly in here, so brace yourself. I just sent two of my guys into the kitchen because their fingers were turning blue.”
He opened the door, and a blast of air so frigid I thought my teeth would break off rolled out of the room. I took a step back, but Simon grabbed my hand and pulled me forward. The room was filled floor to ceiling with monitors, fronted by keyboards and computer components bristling with tentacling wires. Some of the screens showed rapidly scrolling images, too fast for my eye to track. Some were code, some were data feeds of an entirely different sort. None of it made any sense.
“Seriously, you’re going to love this! I’ve been monitoring everything that’s been happening worldwide connected to the gods making landfall, but there’s a ton more I have to do. This house is totally warded, off the grid. It’s the perfect cover for my equipment, and the AC is to die for.”
“Uh-huh. Speaking of gods—who are we looking at, exactly? Nigel gave you the names of the gods the demon mentioned at Danae’s circle before Llyr brought the house down, right? Any uptick in conversation regarding them?”
“Not as much as I thought there would be, and I’ve totally scoured the arcane web,” he said, referencing a kind of Connected dark web I hadn’t even realized existed until very recently. “There’s just no level of consistency. I can’t say one way or another if we’ll have Lugh or Loki breaking through, or someone entirely different.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“I wish I was.” Now that his mania was subsiding, Simon drew in a heavy breath, and I peered at him more closely. The Fool of the Arcana Council looked…exhausted. He hadn’t had an easy time of it these past few weeks, that was for sure. He’d only recently become reunited with a shard of his former self, a shard that had spent the better part of three decades in the land of enlightenment. There were worst places to spend an extended vacation, but to make things right required a lot of reconnecting. Sort of like having lived half your life with one leg, and now suddenly finding you had two and needing to teach yourself how to walk again. You were better off, but it was still an adjustment.
I thought again of Sariah, struggling to find her place in this world too. I needed both her and Simon to make that adjustment, the sooner the better. There was simply far too much work to be done. Too many people counting on us. And too many others willing to sacrifice for a cause I still didn’t fully understand.
As if on cue, one of the monitors lining the wall in Simon’s room-sized refrigerator caught my attention.
It was trained on the makeshift encampment on one of the side lawns of the House of Swords’ headquarters on the outskirts of Vegas. Most of the kids who’d shown up because of clues left in a video game designed by Simon had departed the house to return to their loft apartments or parents’ basements. The ones who stayed looked like they might be building their own biodome soon.
I sighed. There was something I could do with those children, of course, those gamers and internet savants. That group had grown up connected in the non-psychic sense of the word, more linked into the internet and their online tribes than they were even to their friends and family. They understood being “connected” more than a lot of Connecteds did. I could use that.
Simon followed my gaze, and his interest immediately perked up. “That’s one of the reasons I needed to speak to you,” he said. “I need your order for the gamer army to mobilize for the war.”
“My what?” No wonder Jimmy hadn’t told me what was going on here. “Simon, those kids are not trained. I know they think they’re ready to fight. I know they want to help too, and I appreciate that. But they have no idea what that even means in a war on magic. We don’t even know what it means.”
“I know! I know!” Simon’s mania was back. “But I’m not saying we’ll put them in the line of fire. I mean, it’ll technically be in the line of fire, but not really, because they’ll be online, you know? It’ll be a total Ender’s Game reenactment, only in real life!”
I stared at him. “I know you’re about to explain that to me.”
“There’s no explanation necessary. You don’t need to worry about a thing—if you give me the okay to get rolling.”
“My okay? For them to, what—connect online and play a sort of video game? And…that game will somehow help our defense?”
“That’s exactly right!” Simon beamed at me. “So it’s okay for me to recruit them to the cause, get them set up? We don’t have a lot of time, Sara. We’ll need every second we can get to make this work. You’re good with it?”
“Um…sure,” I said, feeling suddenly like a mom who’s been fed half the story. “But they can’t be truly in the line of fire, Simon. Not unless the danger is so great that fighting—really fighting—is the only way they’ll survive. You got that?”
“Absolutely. They’ll be amazing, Sara. You’ll see!” Simon waved his hands at me as another string of lights flared to life below a second monitor. “Enough about that, though. There’s something else I needed you for, so I figured out where you were, and I pulled some strings to get you here.”
“You contacted Jimmy?”
“I contacted Death. She knows where to find you, no matter what.” He gestured vaguely to my arm, and I self-consciously touched my jacket sleeve where it covered Death’s most recent ink. I hadn’t thought of her being able to track me through her work, but—of course she would be able to do that. Why hadn’t I thought of it before?
And more
to the point, when had Jimmy gotten the summons to bring me here? “When did you contact Death, again?”
“Huh? Oh. Whatever, ten minutes ago.” Simon, oblivious to my vague sense of betrayal, kept rolling.
“All right, I’ve got everything set up. You just need to say the word. But I’m telling you, you’re going to want to act fast before they have time to figure out a different response.”
“A different response to what?” I asked, struggling to follow the newest tangent Simon had just barreled down. The Fool had always seemed like someone more on my level than the other Council members, but he was making zero sense right now.
“That.” Simon pointed. I turned to the screen he was indicating, and immediately froze for reasons other than the arctic atmosphere. The image on the monitor showed a large and angry sun beating down on what looked like a dry riverbed. I thought about the unusual heat here in Vegas, but what I was looking at wasn’t Vegas. The small stand of elephants was a particularly noteworthy clue, I thought.
“What am I looking at? Is this a zoo? Or southern Africa?”
“It’s actually both, a private zoo on the Botswanan border, but these pictures haven’t been doctored. Those are real animals who will likely die of thirst now, because in just the past few days, their water supply has dried up like, poof. They’re not moving quite yet, so I get the feeling they’re in shock, but eventually, they’ll have to move in order to find sustenance. This is just the most minor example, but I’m leading with it, because you know: elephants.”
“Okay…” Rather than ask all the questions clamoring in my head, I simply waited. Sometimes, with Simon, that was the best course.
It was here as well. “My point is, we’ve already started seeing the damage from the gods’ energy coming through the veil, even if the gods themselves haven’t quite made the leap. There’ve been sightings all over the planet of stray demons, and wherever they go, the gods will eagerly follow. As these deities crowd close, the impact is like the sun leaning closer in the sky, and voilà, you’ve got your angry sun myth.”
I made a face. Simon was referring to the Buddhist sermon of seven suns which would usher in the end of the world. Each sun would add its rays to the one before it until all seven suns had dried up the water of the world and set the very earth on fire. Not exactly a good way to go.
“Okay, great, there’s a weather component, but talk to me more about these demons.” I gestured to a monitor that flashed with rapidly changing images. “Was their release onto the earth some sort of beta-test process to make sure the gods could survive it? Because we’re in trouble, if so.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Simon said. “Another way is that these demons truly are in service to Llyr, his minions, if you will, and we’re all screwed no matter if the gods make it to planetfall or not. I’m kind of in favor of option one, to tell the truth.”
I was too. “Speaking of planetfall, who exactly is going to come through?”
Simon stopped short. Blinked at me. “I—I told you. I don’t know.”
“Well, who does know? Anyone on the Council?”
More blinking. Talking to Simon really was like conversing with a two-headed dog these days, his mind jumping around so erratically, it was amazing he hadn’t become a gibbering idiot. “Um…I don’t know?” he offered.
“Yeah, I don’t either. But I think we have to bring them all together, honestly. The more we can get into that room at the same time and nail them down to specific answers, the better off we’ll be. Otherwise, it’s going to be like playing a game of phone tag, and there’re simply too many gods and monsters out there to run the risk of getting the information wrong. If we’re set up to combat the god of fire or whatever, and the god of snapping turtles comes through instead, what are we going to do with that?”
“Okay, okay, that’s good,” Simon said, turning back to the monitors. “But you have to think bigger picture, Sara. Setting aside the Chicken Fried Earth issue, now we’ve got possibly gods and definitely demons hitting the scene, most of them doing exactly the wrong thing, making noise, drawing attention. Their antics could be easily explained, for now. But if enough of those stories get out, things could get ugly in a hurry.”
“They could,” I hedged. There’d been no mistaking the demons I saw for anything other than what they were, but how would they look to someone who didn’t have a reference point for such a foreign creature? No matter what community they found themselves in, whoever was the minority in that community would be blamed for anything bad the demons did. That was just the nature of the world, to fear whatever didn’t look like you. It sucked, but it was where we were. “And this is the part where you’re going to tell me how to fix everything?”
“There’s no real fixing it, short of sending the demons back where they belong, and I’m here to tell you, there’re too damn many of them for that to be a viable option. But you can do the second-best thing, which is to let everyone know what they are.”
He pointed to a camera, and I looked at him in horror. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”
“I’m not saying we release it right away,” Simon said. “I’m saying that when and if the suns start rolling in, and when people start noticing that their coyote problem just became a lot more complicated, folks are going to start turning to their governments for answers. Local, regional, national, whatever. It would be handy if we had some answers ready to go.”
“And what does that have to do with me?”
“Up until very recently, you were Interpol’s most wanted—specifically when it comes to unexplained phenomena. And trust me, these guys are up to their elbows in phenomena,” Simon said with a quick grin. “No other Connected has as high a profile. A statement coming from you that everything will be okay will have context.”
“Context as in I’m a criminal, Simon. I don’t think government leaders will be predisposed to listen to any information coming from someone accused of acts of supernatural terrorism and psychic manipulation.”
“And I disagree. It makes you the resident expert on all the shit that’s going down. Because something certainly is. Whether or not they think you’re behind it is irrelevant. They know you understand it, which is way more than they do. Plus, I’m tinkering with the feed so that anyone watching this video won’t be as easily forced by the Magician into selective amnesia, a fact that might be helpful to you down the line.” He waggled a hand. “Might be, might not be. Still not sure on that, honestly.”
“You’re saying you want me to record a message to the leaders of the world, from governments to private collectives, telling them that everything’s going to be okay, we’ve got this, and they should just keep their chins up?”
“Pretty much.” A small beep sounded from one of the computers, and Simon glanced at it. “Great! We’re ready. Keep your eyes on the teleprompter and smile pretty for me, you got it?”
Helpless, I watched as Simon scurried behind the desk, while a Mongolian who’d lashed a fuzzy pink bathrobe over his clothes against the cold stepped up to the camera and trained it on me. A red beeping light flashed from the surface of the camera, mesmerizing me for a split second. To the right of the Mongolian, a screen appeared against the far wall, the words large and easy to read.
So I read them.
“If you’re seeing this message, events have transpired in your communities that you cannot explain, events that include dramatic weather patterns, unusual sightings of threatening figures, and an uptick in allegations regarding the, ah, return of the gods.” I fought the wince at how ridiculous my words sounded, even to my own ears. “If you want to get through this, you’re going to have to listen to the people of this earth who understand what’s happening. To the people of this earth with psychic abilities who can see beyond the five senses. I know it sounds crazy, but no crazier than the earth catching on fire, or reports of demon sightings. It’s a short hop to anarchy when you’ve got that kind of upheaval going on, so this is what you
need to do.”
At that point, the words on the teleprompter ran out, but Simon kept giving me the “go ahead, we’re rolling,” sign. I stared at him, at the Mongolian in the bathrobe, at the camera, then at the empty wall. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have the answers, I couldn’t have the answers, I didn’t know what I was going to tell these people—
Unaccountably panicked at the beeping red light on the still clearly active camera, I chattered on. “Events are unfolding that are not easy to explain with conventional logic and modern science. These events are happening nonetheless. Your people will be understandably confused and frightened, and you’ll want to reassure them. I can help you provide that reassurance. Contact me. No matter what’s going on, I’ll tell you the truth, the truth you need to know, even if your own advisors have no clue how to handle the fallout. In the meantime, treat what’s happening as a weather anomaly, keep your people as safe as possible, and don’t judge what you don’t understand.” I drew in a deep breath. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Cut!” Simon announced excitedly, jerking my attention away from the camera. The Fool’s fingers were flying over a keyboard, but I could only stare at the wall of screens before me, screens showing heat radiating up from busy metropolitan streets, from the ice fields of Antarctica, from open plains, from the ocean. There was no question something was going on all over the world, but it was possible that it could be passed off as a weather event.
At least until a dragon dropped out of the sky. After that, all bets were off.
“We got any chance of stopping what’s coming?”
I asked the question more or less to the bank of monitors, but Simon popped his head up. “We do and we don’t. Mass global destruction, the kind we haven’t seen since the fall of Atlantis? Yeah, we’ve got a good shot at that, if the Council, Connecteds, and the Houses of Magic all work together. We can rebuff the gods over and over again, even if we can’t permanently contain them. That’ll work for the short term, though it’s not ideal.”
