Immortal Architects

by Paige Orwin

  The Conduit sat up. “What? Why?”

  Edmund tried to think. There were a lot of reasons. Good reasons. The kid’s claim hadn’t seemed credible, at first. She was Shattered, after all: that was a medical issue. It made people erratic. No reason to act without more information, so he hadn’t.

  Then the situation had blown up in his face. Barrio Libertad got involved. Mercedes had her say. Triskelion happened. No, Edmund had let Triskelion happen, and it hadn’t just happened – it was Istvan, doing what he did best. Istvan, freed and told he should rule instead of obey.

  And then Mercedes pretended she didn’t know what they’d done. As long as they had Niagara, it didn’t matter. You’re training more wizards, Mr Templeton. I expect results. No more excuses.

  “You aren’t supposed to be here,” he said.

  Kyra looked away.

  “I know Diego released you. I know that this is important. But he let you go against the will of his own people, and we aren’t supposed to have you, either.” Edmund ran a hand through his hair. “We – I – should have given you to Barrio Libertad in the first place, and it was a mistake that I didn’t.”

  “They didn’t believe me,” she mumbled.

  “That’s fine.”

  “If you do, why ain’t you throwing everything you got at it? Why ain’t you doing everything you can? She’s coming back, Mr Templeton. You fought her. You know what she does! Why haven’t you told anyone else?”

  Istvan pushed himself away from the door. “Because you’re damaged!”

  She flinched.

  Edmund held up a hand. Not now. This wasn’t going to help. “Stop it.”

  “No.” Istvan stepped towards the Conduit, form flickering. “Kyra, you must understand. I know that the Susurration made you think that the world is fine, and fair, and reasonable, but it isn’t.”

  Oh, hell.

  Edmund wobbled to his feet. “Istvan–”

  “Let me finish,” roared the specter. He turned back to Kyra, expression hard. “Kyra, you are a child. You are a Negro. You are ill, and don’t know to be ashamed of it. You are tall, and loud, and dark, and you insist on being what you aren’t, and you frighten people – and then you can go and conjure those storms, and destroy whatever you like.”

  Kyra knotted her hands in her lap. She looked at the floor.

  This wasn’t going to end well. This wasn’t going to end well at all.

  “That’s enough,” Edmund said, barring the other man’s way.

  Istvan stepped through him.

  “Kyra, no one knows what to do with you,” he continued. “No one knows where you ought to be. You haven’t even tried to hide! You arrived all of a sudden, shouting about Shokat Anoushak, wild and Shattered and wearing that bloody dress, and that is unforgivable. That is more frightening than your storms.” He leaned closer, setting a hand on the desk beside her. “If you keep carrying on as you have, the world will destroy you. If you understand nothing else, understand that.”

  Kyra balled her hands into fists.

  “I’m sorry,” said Istvan. “That’s how it is. That’s how it always has been.”

  He turned. He glanced at Edmund, and it was a strange glance, not apologetic but not quite angry, either. The ghost crossed his arms and leaned back against the door, staring off into the snow.

  “Great,” said Edmund.

  Kyra got to her feet. “That’s it?” she said. “That’s what you’re worried about?”

  Edmund sighed. Now Istvan had gone and done it. There were things you didn’t say, and you didn’t say them for a reason.

  He rubbed at his face. He wished his head would stop hurting.

  Kyra looked back and forth between him and Istvan. The ghost wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  “That’s stupid,” she said.

  “That’s how it is,” Istvan replied.

  “Look outside! If that’s how it is, you’re OK with how it is out there, too? Full of monsters? All the buildings falling down?” She waved at the ticket window, the hole in the roof, the snow drifting over the remnants of Shokat Anoushak’s sigil. “How is the world anything like it was when you got people who can summon storms, and when there’s wizards and magic, and when anything like that old world ain’t even real?”

  “There have always been wizards,” Edmund muttered.

  “Yeah, whatever! They won’t help me because I’m black? Or because I’m a girl? Or because I’m tall? That’s stupid!”

  “Kyra, it isn’t that. It’s–”

  She threw her hands up. “OK, so it’s all of it. And I sometimes wreck things. But you haven’t even tried talking to the Twelfth Hour? You haven’t told them where we’re at?”

  Edmund sat down again. He rested his elbows on his knees.

  He didn’t know. He didn’t know anymore. Did it matter what she was? Maybe. He might have knocked her around less if she hadn’t seemed older, if she wasn’t so dark, if he hadn’t been under the impression that he was facing a grown man who happened to be black. None of that was her fault.

  It was over. He didn’t want to talk about this.

  “We were trying it your way,” he said.

  “I didn’t want to make it worse,” Istvan said.

  Kyra stared at them. “Whatever,” she finally said. “Will you tell the other wizards now?”

  Edmund let out a breath.

  “I got this on camera,” she added.

  The rest of the breath came out as a wheeze. Damn Diego. Should have known. All of Barrio Libertad was probably watching, given how the fortress felt about privacy. Grace, too. She had to know everything, now.

  Edmund eyed the headband. He couldn’t ask Kyra to take it off. They’d see that, too, and it would seem like he was hiding something.

  “I’ll tell Mercedes,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Magister Hahn. Leader of the Twelfth Hour.”

  Istvan sighed. “The wizard president.”

  “I’ll drop you and Istvan at Niagara,” Edmund continued, “and we’ll go from there. I won’t mention last night. You weren’t supposed to be in New Haven.” He thought of the disaster averted, the blessed fact that his house was still standing. “Besides, that flyer Istvan found might still be–”

  A shriek rattled the building. Grating. Metallic. The roof in the lobby beyond groaned and buckled, the blunt head of the stealth bomber creature nosing through it and shining its blinding gaze down at them.

  Kyra bolted for the door. “Finally!”

  Istvan jerked out of her way as she pulled it open and dashed through. The bomber swiveled its lights towards her, pulling itself through the hole in the roof and setting one great claw and then the other on the broken tile.

  Edmund got up. “Istvan, what the hell were you thinking?”

  The ghost straightened his bandolier. “You can’t pretend that the boy won’t suffer. If he’d been raised in reality, he’d know that.” He watched Kyra run up to the bomber. “You learn early.”

  Edmund frowned. Istvan complained about his own appearance quite a bit, but had nothing to worry about on that front, and he’d insisted more than once that the Twelfth Hour locking him away was completely justifiable. What leg did he have to stand on, saying that?

  Except… in the cable car…

  No. No, that opened up too much trouble. Too much thinking. That had probably been nothing more than the violence talking. Like a drug. It got to him, and made him strange, like he’d been acting all the way to Triskelion and into the siege. He’d done it during the Wizard War, too.

  “What?” asked Istvan.

  Edmund shook his head. “Never mind.”

  Istvan grabbed his shoulder. “What did I say?”

  “It was about Beldam,” Edmund lied, though Beldam had come up in the same awkward conversation and so he hoped there was enough truth to it to make the claim seem sincere. “I’ll tell you later.”

  He looked out the window again. A very familiar blue-furred figu
re was disembarking the plane, accompanied by a swarm of glowing lights. “Oh, good. They found William.”

  Istvan followed his gaze. “Ah.”

  That had been fast. Shockingly fast. Those lights – Marat? – could probably cover miles of ground, searching for someone, and then the airplane creature could pick up whatever they found. The Twelfth Hour needed a system like that.

  Now the only risk was whether William would hold the long wait against him.

  Edmund headed into the lobby. “William. How are you holding up?”

  The beast turned. Ice sheened his fur, a brittle coating that melted in the glittering glow surrounding him before re-freezing moments later. He held up his screen. The glass was cracked, and no words appeared on it. He shook his head.

  “Here,” said Kyra. She handed him the marker.

  William shook his head, growling. He swept aside the snow before him with a great paw, then watched as ice crept over the tile in its place.

  “That marker isn’t going to stick,” Edmund said.

  “Oh,” said Kyra.

  “Carve in the ice,” Istvan said, arriving behind him. “That’s what the other one did.” He took out his knife, knelt, and scraped a gouge in the surface to demonstrate.

  The Tyger nodded.

  “Sorry about the wait,” Edmund told him as he set about clawing clumsy words into the ice sheet, knowing that the apology alone wouldn’t be enough for leaving him to bob helplessly in the lake for those long hours.

  A shrug.

  Kyra patted the bomber’s steel wing-claw. “Thanks for getting him back.”

  The creature screamed its harsh scream. She grinned up at it, wincing.

  William backed away, and pointed.

  I’M AN AGENT – WHO KNEW!

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Right. Of course he was. The kid was a walking surveillance tool and the tiger was a spy. That’s how the world worked now.

  Edmund sighed. He was tired of ice. He was tired of water. He was tired of no one telling him anything until they were sure that it was the worst possible time. He wanted to be able to talk to Istvan again without anything being complicated or strained. He missed complaints about unimportant things, like the wallpaper. If he had his way, he was never going to visit Canada again.

  He knew he wasn’t going to get his way.

  It took almost an hour for William to painstakingly scratch out his story. He was a Greater Great Lakes creature, as they had suspected. Shape, abilities, and design all varied by region. Marat – or another fire, it was unclear – had performed some kind of memory erasure before sending him off to investigate Big East, its lack of monsters, and its murder of Shokat Anoushak. Nothing save his likely origin could be traced back, ensuring some measure of safety from whatever had destroyed Providence.

  They had counted on curiosity eventually drawing him back. If that failed, they had two surviving stealth flyers. If he were killed… they would have their answer.

  William wasn’t the only project, either. Every beast in the Greater Great Lakes was afraid. They were all former slave soldiers, with only vague memories of humanity. They were splintered into dozens of factions, none agreeing on how to go about life after the Wizard War, and all they knew about their southern neighbor was that everyone like them in it was dead. Shokat Anoushak was dead. They were free, and terrified that they would be the next target.

  Then came Lord Kasimir’s beachhead at Niagara.

  As far as William could tell, that had been the last straw. The appearance of an army so close to the heart of the Greater Great Lakes convinced several parties that they were mere months away from invasion.

  The storms appeared not long afterward: Kyra, fleeing across the lake.

  Kyra’s cult wasn’t just crazy. They were probably desperate. They might well think that the only sure defense against what the Wizard War had unleashed was the Immortal herself: killed once already, and returned again in glory. The most powerful wizard to ever live. Their creator. Maybe they even thought that they could convince her to show mercy to her “children.”

  Nothing Edmund had ever read suggested that would be the case.

  “Why are you allowed to tell us any of this?” he asked.

  William pointed at Kyra, then tapped a claw against his head.

  The headband. Barrio Libertad. Marat knew now that there would be no hiding, and was trying a different gamble. Their agent had returned intact, more or less, and there was nothing left to lose.

  Edmund sat back against the outstretched wing of the bomber. Marat’s lights circled its head in a glowing halo, and it was the only place warm enough to be tolerable as the night’s chill ate through his jacket.

  He was tired.

  Was he ever tired.

  “Kyra,” he asked, “do you remember how you were captured?”

  The Conduit shook her head. She sat beside him, on the side closer to Marat, and was still wearing Edmund’s coat. “Just what I already told you. I was… It was confusing. Really fast. I guess they must have taken me over the water, but there’s just this… mess.”

  She shook her head again. She was flagging badly, starting to nod off and then snapping upright again when spoken to. Still awake, but forced to fight for it. She seemed to have forgotten about the last snack bar, clutched in one hand and laid over her knees, opened but untouched.

  “A blur,” said Istvan. “A jumble. Too many memories.”

  Kyra shrugged, not looking at him.

  The ghost sighed. He sat by himself, leaning down from one of the benches, the Tyger sprawled on the ice before him. He had said very little since his outburst earlier. Edmund wished he could stop worrying about him. “Can beasts be Shattered?” Istvan asked.

  N, scratched William. ONLY HER WORD – NONE OTHER

  Edmund nodded. The cult would have needed someone else, then, if they were going to take advantage of Shattered memories. Kyra. Rochester, too, was across the lake.

  …but it was spellscarred. It had been for eight years. Which meant that either she wasn’t from there after all, had been somewhere else, or had somehow survived in the spellscars all this time. Maybe she’d been out of the city when the Wizard War hit. She would have been maybe seven years old, then.

  He rubbed at his temples. It didn’t matter, anyway. The Susurration would never have let her remember anything so traumatic: it had probably rewritten her entire past, and they would never know where she was really from. She would never know. Just like William. Every beast in the Greater Great Lakes was rebuilding an identity from scratch.

  What a kick in the head.

  “What are you going to do now?” he asked William.

  A single hovering glow melted the surface of the scratched ice, and then retreated. William froze it again just by reaching over it.

  STAY

  That’s what Edmund was afraid of. “You’re sure? What about Mendoza?”

  William paused. His ears flicked.

  NOT FOREVER, he amended.

  “We ought to tell the Magister,” Istvan murmured.

  “I’ll do that,” said Edmund. “William, will we have any way to contact you?”

  The Tyger made a low rumbling sound. He raised his head to look at the orbiting lights of Marat.

  The motes spun away from the bomber, whirling down and across the lobby before coalescing into a pair of wide, blank, staring eyes. They blinked once. Then the shapes rushed apart, flowing towards the bomber again. The creature opened its jaws. Marat’s lights streamed into it.

  The bomber loosed a creaking growl and shifted, lowering itself closer to the ground. Its ridged back formed itself into a row of saddles. Another flight. Marat express. The place where Kyra had sat even had extra bars to hold onto.

  It seemed they would be entertaining guests.

  “Yesss,” whispered Kyra.

  Edmund smiled a fixed smile. “Thank you,” he said. “But I’ll get myself home.”

  Istvan and Kyra rode back ac
ross the lake, without Edmund. Strictly speaking, neither of them needed to make use of the mockery’s services, but Kyra had insisted and, so far as Istvan was concerned, if Marat were to come back with them, keeping it (them?) and the aircraft creature company was the polite thing to do.

  It did, however, carry the disadvantage of leaving him alone with Kyra.

  The child wouldn’t speak to him. She had refused to even look at him. She sat in the saddle before him, with Edmund’s empty seat between, and dozed. Yes, she was tired, but Istvan knew it was more than that.

  He’d hurt her. Again. And no matter how much he told himself it was for her own good – she had to know, she had to understand how it worked, she had to be prepared and strengthened for the suffering she would endure simply for being – he couldn’t help but think of what he’d been told, long ago. He was a disgrace. A sinner. A moral deviant at worst and an inherited defect at best, something that ought to be weeded out for the good of the species.

  And he could hide it. Kyra had no hope of that.

  Kyra didn’t know she ought.

  What would it have been like, growing up like that? An idealized upbringing. Always fair, always in her favor. No one to tell her she shouldn’t speak back to her betters, or that she shouldn’t dress how she liked. No consequences for looking the way she did. No questions when she declared, against all evidence, that she was a girl, and would be treated as such.

  A fantasy. None of it real. All of it gone. The Susurration had done her more damage than she would ever know, letting her run wild like that.

  So why was Istvan almost jealous?

  He let her sleep. It was a short trip back to Niagara, accompanied by the soft halo of the lights that kept them warm, and Kyra seemed to have forgiven Marat for the acts of its associate so long as it stayed with the airplane creature she loved and went nowhere near the statue that burned in its bed of ash. Children were easily appeased, but had memories for hurt as long as anyone’s.

  She probably thought Istvan had betrayed her. Twice.

  They hummed along under a cloudless sky studded with stars. As they stooped lower, the far shore came into view: a sudden darkness, where the reflections on the water ended; a ragged gash in the night, torn by trees, and edged by the faint glow of Niagara’s remaining lights. In moments they were circling over the dam complex, descending in broad spirals… and then Istvan realized.